4
Marx knew that the incompatibility between classical political thought and modern political conditions lay in the accomplished fact of the French and Industrial Revolutions, which together had raised labor, traditionally the most despised of all human activities, to the highest rank of productivity and pretended to be able to assert the time-honored ideal of freedom under unheard of conditions of universal equality.[1]
Plato and Marx are the central characters in the Arendtian narrative of western political philosophy. She claimed that “our tradition of political thought” began with Plato and came to an end in Marx.[2] As we have seen, this does not mean that she asserted the end of politics, or of political reflection and judgment, but rather that a governing set of evaluative assumptions and conceptual oppositions had lost their traditional authority so that we are now required to think about human affairs ohne Geländer, without inherited banisters.
Arendt admired Plato and Marx as deeply as she disagreed with them. For her, they were great thinkers, unavoidable thinkers with whom we must constantly struggle. We cannot overcome their tremendous influence on our understanding and conduct of politics by neglecting or dismissing them. Rather, we must identify the central experiences and events that shaped their political thinking and critically challenge the interpretive legacy they bequeathed us.
As we begin this chapter on Marx, we need to remember Arendt’s overriding conviction that the western tradition has been basically antipolitical. It has largely been framed not by the friends and supporters of politics, but by its intellectual adversaries who wished to subordinate political activity to some allegedly higher purpose. Four pivotal moments dominate Arendt’s genealogical narrative. In classical Greece, Plato attempted to subordinate politics to the superior life of philosophy. In the early Christian era, St. Paul urged the disciples of Jesus to withdraw from the affairs of the world for the sake of their personal salvation. At both the advent and climax of modernity, the liberal bourgeoisie placed politics and government in the service of capitalist economic ambitions. And the centuries-old tradition finally collapsed when Marx substituted an ideological philosophy of history for a genuine theory of political governance and action.
Arendt’s critical engagement with Marx occurs in several different textual settings. In The Human Condition, she criticizes his theory of labor and the teleological primacy he assigned to the value of species life. In On Revolution, she criticizes his philosophy of history, “the murderous dialectic of necessity and freedom” he effectively promulgated. In The Crises of the Republic, she criticizes Marx’s endorsement of revolutionary violence and his uncritical reliance on material abundance as a guarantee of universal freedom. But the interpretive key to her appraisal of Marx can be found in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” the opening essay in Between Past and Future.[3] In that seminal essay, Arendt situates Marx in direct relation to Plato and connects the beginning of political philosophy with its putative demise. While this chapter will draw liberally on several Arendtian texts, at its structural center is her placement of Marx at the end of our political tradition.
Through mythical symbols and stories, and memorable philosophical arguments, Plato established the hierarchical contrasts at the heart of the western tradition.[4] In these carefully correlated Platonic oppositions, sensible becoming is subordinated to intelligible being, transient opinion to unalterable knowledge, rhetorical discourse to contemplative silence and political action to philosophical understanding and thought. In the pre-Socratic polis, classical citizens forcefully liberated themselves from necessity and coercion in order to share in political liberty. In Plato’s deliberate cultural reversal, true philosophers escaped the burdens of politics in order to contemplate intelligible being. When they reluctantly returned to the polis, they used their privileged epistemic authority to prevent the recurrence of Socrates’fate by making the cave safe for philosophy.[5]
Aristotle refined and developed the hierarchical distinctions he inherited from his teacher. He retained Plato’s belief in the ethical supremacy of the contemplative life, but he argued that the active life had a hierarchical structure of its own. Thus praxis and lexis, the fundamental political activities, were ethically superior to poiesis, the productive activity of the craftsman, while both praxis and poiesis were superior to ponos, the burdensome labor of the slave. Aristotle justified his hierarchical contrasts on both ethical and metaphysical grounds. Ethically, human activities should be ranked based on their freedom, nobility and excellence. Properly free or liberal activities are chosen for their own sake because they are intrinsically good. They are explicitly contrasted with those lesser endeavors undertaken from necessity or as a means to some higher end. Ethical and metaphysical criteria converge in Aristotle’s influential appraisal of the free lives that transcend biological necessity. For Aristotle, the philosophical life is best because it is godlike in nature; the political life is noble because it actively engages the highest practical capacities of mortal citizens; the hedonistic life devoted to the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is vulgar because it is available to brutes as well as to humans.[6] At the base of Aristotle’s evaluative hierarchy is the laboring existence of the slave. The slave’s life lacks freedom, nobility and excellence. Immersed in biological necessity and enforced through the master’s coercion, it is not fully human by Aristotle’s standards.
Hierarchical inequality, both metaphysical and ethical, shapes the Greek cultural tradition. The philosophical life is accessible only to the most virtuous citizens; the political life is available only to the male masters of private Greek households; while the life of sensual pleasure is open to everyone freed from the burdens of slavery. The higher and freer the form of life, the fewer the people able to enjoy it.
Karl Marx deliberately rebelled against these classical hierarchies articulated in Greek philosophical thought and transmitted to the Latin West through scholastic theology and pedagogy. By the mid-nineteenth century, the principal realities of European life were no longer compatible with Greek and medieval ethical and political theories. Although Marx was conversant with classical thought, he was an essentially modern thinker, deeply attuned to the historical realities of his age. Thus he embraced defining aspects of modernity deeply inconsistent with Plato’s and Aristotle’s anthropological vision: 1. Marx strongly endorsed the process of modern secularization; he rejected philosophical and religious other worldliness, asserting the exclusive dignity and importance of human affairs on this earth.[7] 2. He shared the modern distrust of theoretical contemplation and disinterested knowledge. For Marx, genuine science begins with suspicion of sensible appearances and common opinions; it proceeds to uncover the invisible causes underlying sensible phenomena and unreflective belief. Having discovered these lawful patterns of causal necessity, humans can finally become masters of their destiny, strategically allying their efforts with the ruling forces of nature and history.[8] 3. Marx strongly endorsed the democratic aspirations of the French Revolution. The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were no longer restricted to the privileged few but meant for the entire human race. In fact, until liberty and justice were universally “realized,” the historical project of modernity would remain incomplete.[9] 4. The industrial revolution had transformed the scale and scope of human history. It had created a dynamic urban society based on international commerce and innovative technology, and animated by the profit maximizing ideology of capitalism. With the rise of the factory system, productive manufacture and commercial exchange, increasingly dominated Europe’s public affairs.
A revisionary anthropology supported these powerful revolutionary currents. The leading moderns glorified what the ancients had disparaged, and treated with contempt and suspicion what their classical predecessors considered noble and godlike. The supremacy of disinterested knowledge was denied; the importance and dignity of the vita activa were affirmed; and productive endeavor was exalted as the highest expression of human freedom and power.
Marx was deeply aware of these historical changes and their incompatibility with traditional hierarchical beliefs. In Arendt’s view, “he tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its conceptual oppositions.”[10] This polemical strategy led him to overturn or invert the ancient Platonic antitheses. Arendt chooses three revealing examples to highlight Marx’s iconoclastic approach: his conception and reappraisal of labor, violence, and philosophical reflection. Each of these reversals is succinctly expressed in a provocative statement intended to contradict an important traditional belief. “Labor created man.” “Violence is the midwife of history.” “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.”[11]
In asserting that labor created man, Marx challenged the biblical conception of God and the philosophical and scriptural appraisals of labor. For the ancient Greeks, labor had its origin in human animality, in the endemic struggle of mortals with biological necessity and the demands of survival. In Hebrew scripture, labor is depicted as a punishment imposed on Adam and Eve for the original sin. In both the Greek and biblical traditions, human freedom and happiness require liberation from the pain and burden of labor. By deliberately glorifying labor, by making it the creative source of the human species itself, Marx espouses a Promethean humanism openly defiant of the biblical and classical assessment of the human condition.
In describing violence as the midwife of history, Marx challenged the Greek conceptions of politics, action and speech. According to Herodotus, the father of western historiography, the purpose of historical narrative is to preserve from oblivion the great words and deeds of mortals, both Greek and Persian alike.[12] These glorious actions worthy of enduring remembrance are essentially political in nature. Politics is an affair of shared logos, of persuasive speech among equals, the free interaction of citizens in a lawfully constituted public realm. Coercion and violence (bia) were specifically excluded from the conduct of political life. While they governed pre-political relations in the private household and dominated the transactions between Greeks and barbarians, they functioned within the polis itself as an ultima ratio, as an instrument of last resort when all appeals to persuasion and argument had failed.[13]
Marx believed, however, that class struggle and conflict were the essence of history and that violence was pervasive in historical politics. Greek society had been effectively divided between masters and slaves, feudal society between nobles and serfs, and industrial society between capital and labor. The dominant economic class at each stage in history used its political power, its legal control of the means of violence, to oppress and subdue the class beneath it. Government and law primarily functioned to protect inequalities of power rooted in exploitative economic relations. Beneath the surface civility of politics the state was despotic and coercive, using ideology and law to conceal its oppressive intent.
For Marx, the turning points in history occurred when the exploited class revolted successfully against its economic and political oppressor. These violent revolutions transformed existing social and political relations. The decline and death of the ruling class coincided, however, with the birth of a new but structurally similar class rivalry, as the historical pattern repeated itself. Thus violence governs political history in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary times. But while the normal political violence of the state sustains the oppressive status quo, revolutionary violence moves history closer towards its ultimate goal: a classless and stateless society no longer burdened by oppression, coercion and rule.
In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx takes critical aim at the history of western philosophy. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”[14] The philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel had emphasized the epistemic priority of theoria, the disinterested knowledge of being. In classical Greece, the theoros was a disengaged observer, a person of leisure (schole) who silently discerned the true order of things. The speculative vision of the theoros left existing reality unaltered, whether the objects of theorein were Plato’s immutable forms or history’s dialectical telos(Hegel). The rhythm and spirit of the vita contemplativa are succinctly expressed in Aquinas’ lovely description: “to rest and see, to see and love, to love and praise.”
Although Hegel was an innovator who made the history of human affairs the new focus of philosophical thought, in one crucial respect he remained quite traditional. He continued to believe that the philosophical quest climaxed in the contemplative knowledge of the divine. The telos of history, the autonomous freedom of absolute spirit, was brought to fulfillment in the rational self-knowledge of the Hegelian philosopher. For Hegel, the true meaning of history is fully disclosed in the teleological development of western philosophy.[15]
A critical student of Hegel, deeply influenced by his dialectical account of the historical process, Marx openly dissented from important aspects of Hegelian philosophy. For Marx, the end or meaning of history is the actualization of human rather than divine freedom, an actualization achieved by deliberately “making history” rather than contemplatively observing its passage. Marx clearly subscribed to the Baconian principle that true knowledge is power that proves its worth in the fruits and works it helps to produce.[16] For Bacon, this epistemic revision was designed to ensure technical mastery of the natural universe; for Marx it was meant to ensure mastery of the historical process; and for both, to promote the radical transformation of the human condition through the alliance of science and technology.
The modern cultural emphasis on increasing “fruits and works” clearly reversed the Platonic hierarchies. In Plato’s well ordered polis, all practical activities, from agriculture to legislation, occurred in support of philosophical inquiry. Human existence culminated not in the opinion-based practices of the shadowy cave but in the vision of eternal truth by the liberated few. As nous was the godlike power in the soul, so contemplative understanding of the divine was the supreme activity in the well-ordered life. The whole vita activa was politically organized to support the philosophical quest.[17]
For Marx, the philosophical tradition inspired by Plato had inverted the causal order of reality. The true purpose of theoretical inquiry was to understand the lawful dynamics of nature and history. The historical process is teleological, as Hegel had claimed, but its telos is entirely practical and not theoretical. Human history is moving dialectically, irresistibly, towards universal freedom and equality. But dialectical motion is highly complex and does not follow a linear progression. This complexity entails that material progress coexists with radical alienation, for human beings have become neither equal nor free in modern capitalist societies. Marx attributed radical alienation to both capitalist reality and thought; only a critical philosophy that grasps the causal connections between being and consciousness could overcome it. The philosophical tradition had been practically impotent and productively fruitless because it misunderstood the true relation between cause and effect. It is only economic forces (the increasing productivity of labor) and social struggle (revolutionary violence) that drive human history forward. These material and efficient causes operate from below, pace Hegel, creating and then transforming the forces of production that advance the historical wheel.[18]
The critical stages in human history are properly defined in economic terms. Marx refers to the ownership and control of economic forces as “the relations of production.” On his account, the great historical revolutions occur when these economically structured relationships are overturned by the previously oppressed economic class. Prior to an economic revolution, it is the dominant socio-economic class that exercises political authority and controls the institutions of culture and pedagogy. The philosophy, art and religion of the pre-revolutionary period invariably express the material interests of the ownership class, but they normally do so clandestinely. The ruling class conceals the full extent of its oppression by falsely representing its hegemonic power. Marx designates these distorted and self-serving portraits of historical power ideologies. Their strategic purpose is to justify the legitimacy of those who command and to pacify the anger and resistance of those who obey.[19]
Marx’s critical philosophy of history, therefore, has two closely related objectives: to reveal class based ideologies for what they are, distorted expressions of interest based consciousness; and to arouse and channel the revolutionary energies of the economically oppressed. The critique of ideology undermines the cultural and political authority of established power; the explanatory science of historical change enables revolutionary theorists and their working class allies to align their efforts with the real causes of social transformation.
According to Arendt, Marx not only challenged the traditional estimates of labor, violence and philosophy, he also implicitly endorsed them.[20] On her reading of Marx, he was a self-consciously modern thinker working within an ancient intellectual tradition, for whom the convergence of classical and modern ideals generated internal contradictions. For Arendt, these unintended contradictions become clearest in the utopian society Marx claims will emerge from the overthrow of capitalism. She questions what human existence will be like after the meaning of history has been “realized” in a classless society? In theory, economic activity will be so productive that every one will be liberated from alienated labor and the coercive rule of the state. All human beings, without exception, will now enjoy the leisure and freedom available only to citizens in the Athenian polis.[21] But in classical Athens, citizens forcefully freed themselves from labor and coercion so that they could engage in the higher activities of philosophy and politics. Arendt then addresses this seminal question to Marx. If the actual purpose of philosophy is to promote the classless society, a society in which philosophy and politics are no longer necessary, what are socialized citizens to do with their precious leisure and liberty? What is their bitterly won freedom for?
Arendt traces these unresolved tensions in Marx to a fundamental conflict in his intellectual loyalties. As a Promethean humanist, Marx glorified labor for its limitless creative potential, while implicitly treating it as a curse from which socialized humanity would be liberated. As a revolutionary activist, he strove to eliminate the bourgeois state and to end its coercive authority, but he could find no trace of excellence or greatness in the bureaucratic distribution of benefits, the principal form of “political” activity in a stateless society. Finally,as a radical philosopher of history, he deliberately subordinated the contemplative to the active life, but left no credible task for philosophy to perform after its historical commission had been fulfilled.
Arendt believed that Marx confronted unprecedented modern realities that he tried to address using traditional concepts that no longer aligned with them. Inadvertently he demonstrated the ensnaring power of “the tradition” in the process of seeking to overcome and reverse it.[22]
We need to gain some critical distance from Arendt’s reading of Marx before attempting to appraise its validity. To this end, we shall use sections A–C of this chapter to develop an independent account of Marx as a student and critic of modernity. We shall focus on three aspects of his thought: the scandalous contradictions in modern society, the dialectical nature of history, and his many-sided critique of capitalism. With this background in place, we shall revisit Arendt’s placement of Marx in the history of the western tradition and evaluate her assessment of him as the last great political philosopher.
Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt were both humanistic thinkers. Each was deeply concerned about protecting human dignity and extending human liberty. Each was openly hostile to the conditions of existence that emerged under bourgeois capitalism. They were strikingly united in what they opposed, and profoundly divided by contrasting anthropological visions. Arendt was a political humanist committed to restoring the dignity of republican citizenship, and preventing ideology and terror from destroying human life on this earth. Marx was a Promethean humanist committed to defending the dignity of productive labor and overcoming the scandalous contradictions in modern society. His socialized humanism is culturally rooted in the intellectual revolutions of modernity, the radical reconceptions of nature and history that began with Copernicus and Galileo. Among the leading scientific naturalists, he is closest to Darwin, whose evolutionary account of species genesis and perishing parallels Marx’s theory of historical change. And while Hegel awakened Marx’s historical consciousness, his mature philosophy of history defiantly challenged Hegel’s philosophical and cultural authority.[23]
The enduring power of Marx’s analysis is grounded in its synoptic character. Marx combined the critical suspicion encouraged by Descartes with the enlightenment’s alliance of scientific knowledge and technical power. In fact, he treated that alliance as the principal source of modern progress and pride. At the same time, he embraced the social and historical awareness of the romantic tradition. He supported the romantic critique of liberal individualism and explicitly rejected the Cartesian theory of the disembodied, disengaged subject. Marx insisted that human beings are always embodied agents belonging to specific economic classes with their particular historical identities and prejudices. These classes belong to distinct stages in history differentiated by their economic, political and cultural institutions and beliefs. Conceived as an intelligible whole, human history exhibits a dialectical pattern of movement and conflict, as human beings constantly change their relations to nature and to one another.
Although Marx would have rejected the description, he was a deeply romantic thinker. Like other nineteenth century Romantics, he aspired to an integral form of humanism that would overcome the philosophical and practical dichotomies enshrined in enlightenment liberalism.[24] Thus he sharply opposed Kant’s bifurcations of subject and object, mind and nature, freedom and necessity, individual and society. His theoretical and practical ideal was a humanized naturalism or naturalized humanism that overcame these provisional dichotomies within a comprehensive dialectical synthesis.[25]
This convergence of contrasting cultural currents helps account for Marx’s unique sensibility. He shared the enlightenment’s confidence in unlimited historical progress through the technical mastery of nature. But he also endorsed the profound romantic critique of the bittersweet fruits of the modern age. For Marx, mid-nineteenth century Europe was a tangled knot of greatness and wretchedness, of unprecedented hope and severe disillusionment. But how to explain this unhappy conjunction of practical and emotional opposites? Marx believed that modernity had created secular expectations it had manifestly failed to satisfy, expectations about universal freedom, equality, and expressive fulfillment. I call Marx a romantic because he failed to question the plausibility of these extravagant hopes, seeking instead to fulfill them by joining strategic violence to the scientific mastery of history.
The secular aspirations of modernity were concretely embodied in the struggles and dreams of the French Revolution. Marx saw this still unfinished revolution as the decisive event in modern history, the watershed moment that ended an old institutional and cultural order and gave rise to a new one.[26] The revolution marked the end of the Ancien Regime, the hierarchical ordering of human society rooted in medieval feudalism. Under the old regime, the source of political power and legitimacy was inherited land and title. The accepted authority of kings, nobles and clergy rested on their established position in a hierarchical structure sanctified by religion and tradition. But with the deliberate execution of Louis XVI, the unleashing of the Jacobin terror against the nobility and the eventual acceptance of Napoleon’s radical reforms, the traditional structures of feudalism were swept away never to return.
The new liberal capitalist order that replaced those structures was not based on inherited status, but on money, finance, credit and commercial and legal expertise. Under early modern capitalism, fluid and exchangeable wealth replaced tangible property as the source of economic power and influence.[27] The newly dominant capitalists defended an alternative model of social existence based on the voluntary exchange of goods and services for personal profit. For the liberal defenders of capitalism, sweet commerce, le doux commerce, would make traditional forms of public authority, both political and religious, no longer necessary. In Marx’s judgment, it was the European bourgeoisie, the champions and beneficiaries of commercial capitalism, who really emerged victorious from the great revolution. Economically, they now owned the capital and controlled the credit in post-revolutionary Europe. Culturally and politically, their influential theory of laissez faire provided public justification for this novel experiment in economic and political order.[28]
Throughout the nineteenth century, political reflection in Europe centered on the French Revolution. Conservatives were nostalgic for all that the revolution had violently destroyed: divinely sanctioned monarchy, the spiritual and temporal authority of clerics and nobles, the ancestral customs, mores and landmarks of the European past. Both political and cultural conservatives viewed the liberal rejection of political and religious authority as a recipe for chaos and eventual despotism.[29]
Economic and political liberals, for the most part, celebrated the new bourgeois ordering of society. They argued that voluntary economic exchanges among enlightened individuals would eventually promote the well being of all. Liberated from the archaic structures of the Ancien Regime and the traditional moral and religious prejudices against commerce, Europe would experience a future of international peace and prosperity.[30]
Radical social thinkers like Marx were openly contemptuous of bourgeois liberal complacency. They forcefully insisted that new forms of exploitation and violence had replaced the despotism of nobles and kings. It was now bourgeois capitalists rather than landed aristocrats and clerics who piously justified their inordinate power and privilege. The autocratic ideology of the divine right of kings had simply been replaced by the liberal ideology of laissez faire.
Marx aspired to leadership of the radical camp. He hated bourgeois society and rejected the principles and policies of classical liberalism. He insisted that the Revolutionary promise of universal emancipation and freedom remained, in the language of Hegel, “unactualized.” Without a far more radical social and economic transformation, the defining aspirations of modernity would remain “abstract and disembodied.” The limited freedom and restricted equality supported by bourgeois liberalism failed to match the utopian promises of the Revolution. Although Marx ridiculed the effectiveness of moral norms and ideals, he was profoundly committed to the secular ideals of the revolutionary cause: the fullest measure of liberty, equality, and fraternity for the whole human race.
Marx warned his contemporaries that until the demands of 1789 were actualized in a new social order, Europe would remain in a state of civil war.[31] This conflict was unlike the wars of religion that brutalized the seventeenth century, or the wars of national expansion and consolidation that eighteenth century monarchs had conducted. For Marx, the decisive historical struggle was not rooted in confessional differences or dynastic ambition, but in the deepening antagonism between the bourgeois owners of industrial capital and the urban laboring class that Marx called the proletariat. The coercive power of the bourgeois state actively protected the property rights of capital and invoked the dominant liberal ideology in their defense. For Marx the protracted conflict between capital and labor was the ultimate historical struggle, because it was rooted in the fundamental contradictions of modernity.
What were those revolutionary contradictions as Marx understood them? The key to his dialectical analysis is what Arendt calls “the social question,” the scandal of dehumanizing poverty in the midst of unprecedented wealth and material abundance.[32] Human poverty, of course, was not a uniquely modern phenomenon. Both ancient and modern societies had failed to overcome the persisting division between the rich and the poor, between the affluent few and the indigent many. Throughout western history, that evident social division had been considered part of the nature of things, a result of natural necessity or an unalterable consequence of original sin. Even compassionate Christians who sought to alleviate the sufferings of the poor accepted the admonition of Christ, “The poor you will always have with you.”
Marx transformed the question of poverty by analyzing it in essentially modern terms. The modern alliance of science and technology had given human beings intellectual mastery over nature. The industrial and agricultural revolutions allowed them to produce far more than they needed to live. The democratic upheavals in Europe and North America had destroyed hierarchical institutions and heightened expectations of both public and private equality. The historic convergence of these several revolutions had raised human hopes for a novus ordo saecolorum. But the demoralizing reality of industrial capitalism had shattered this inspiring secular dream. Capitalism had extended human mastery over nature while creating new patterns of social and political oppression.
Marx believed that proletarian poverty was not due to natural necessity but to systemic exploitation. Capitalism’s scandalous inequalities were sustained by the coercive power of the state and the legal protection of property rights. Marx dramatized the mid-nineteenth century as an era of scandalous contrasts, “the best of times and the worst of times” à la fois. The oppressive contradictions were inescapable: power and impotence, liberty and slavery, interdependence and isolation, abundance and impoverishment. The most radical injustices darkened the industrial cities of Europe, as the working class, whose labor had created the collective abundance, lived under conditions of material and spiritual deprivation.
Although Marx considered himself a critical social theorist and historian who scorned all appeals to religious and moral idealism, his self-image is somewhat misleading. His power and prestige depend heavily on his prophetic critique of industrial capitalism.[33] Like the ancient Hebrew prophets, Marx fiercely criticized the indifference and hypocrisy of established power. He defended the poor and oppressed, he excoriated the idolatry of money and profit, he condemned the inhumanity of the capitalist bourgeoisie. He combined unrelenting hostility to capitalist oppression with utopian hopes for the future. In the classless society that will replace bourgeois capitalism, as in the prophetic vision of the kingdom of God, the lion will lie down with the lamb and justice and peace will prevail evermore.[34]
How did Marx articulate his utopian vision of universal equality and freedom? It has three interrelated aspects, each remedying a structural flaw in the bourgeois capitalist order. In the classless society, all forms of human alienation and oppression would cease. In traditional Biblical language, both sin and the enduring sources and consequences of sin would completely disappear. With alienated labor abolished, everyone would enjoy meaningful work and express their humanity through productive social achievement. With the abolition of the capitalist state, everyone would enjoy meaningful citizenship, deliberating, choosing and acting cooperatively for the benefit of the whole human race. With the contradictions of capitalism overcome, everyone would enjoy meaningful leisure and liberty, the cultural benefits of productive abundance and just distribution. Marx’s secular dream, his vision of comprehensive human fulfillment, would become the common reality of the species. In the classless society, all men and women “would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon . . . and read Plato after dinner.”[35]
Marx was deeply indebted to Hegel, the great modern philosopher of history. By redirecting philosophy’s focus from Newtonian science to universal history, Hegel radically changed the western tradition. The temporal sequence of human affairs had been a marginal concern of his predecessors.[36] History had been considered an haphazard collection of disconnected events without immanent meaning or intelligibility. By insisting on the intelligible significance of history, Hegel challenged this powerful philosophical prejudice. Because the cumulative passage of time is meaningful, it is open to theoretical understanding and articulation. History not only changes but actually develops, though the intelligible structure of its development is not evident to common sense. The historical process does not follow a linear pattern. Its motion, instead, is dialectical. This means that history has developed concretely by erecting its own oppositions, contradictions, antagonisms, before actively overcoming them within a dynamic and concordant whole. Hegel also believed that the dialectical logic of rational thought governed the movement of history. All temporal and historical sequences were rational and purposive, advancing dialectically to an immanent end or goal. Until that goal was “actualized,” history remained incomplete, lacking in its full reality and truth.[37]
Hegel believed that the telos of world history was the fulfillment of the divine nature. Absolute spirit, Hegel’s heterodox conception of God, required the temporal emergence of space and time, the lawful processes of nature and history and the cooperation of individual persons and civilized cultures, to achieve its full actualization. Hegel called the full actualization of the divine, freedom or spiritual autonomy. Its highest expression was the rational self-knowledge of God achieved in and through Hegel’s philosophy of history. This supreme spiritual achievement was the ultimate purpose of temporal becoming, the implicit goal to which every significant historical event had partly contributed.
Hegel distinguished three levels of spirit in history, the subjective spirit of the finite individual, the objective spirit of particular national cultures or communities, the absolute spirit of the infinite Hegelian God. The three levels were intelligibly connected for finite spirits only actually developed within historical cultures, while both lesser forms of spirit indirectly contributed to actualizing the divine plan. Although subjective and objective spirits are not identical with the reality of God, they are finite expressions of the developing divine nature. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit “creates” them and then employs them providentially to fulfill its own teleological requirements.[38]
In each of its ascending forms, the life of spirit also follows a dialectical pattern. Spirit develops, it progressively actualizes its essence, through productive expression. By means of these concrete expressions, spirit embodies itself externally in what appears to be an independent object. This provisional and apparent independence of spirit’s expressive life is the key to Hegel’s concept of alienation. Spirit becomes alienated from its temporal expressions when it fails to recognize them as essential moments in its necessary lawful development. During this period of alienation, both space and time, both nature and history, appear to exist independent of God and unrelated to God’s ultimate purpose. Hegel seeks to overcome this provisional alienation by reconceiving the concrete expressions of spirit as essential moments in its life of dialectical becoming. Thus, for Hegel, the divine life of God that is universal history climaxes in the philosophical grasp of this holistic teleological process. God’s climactic self-knowledge, God’s “actualized” freedom, is only achieved through philosophical spirits whose intellectual and moral development is shaped by culturally specific historical communities. Thus for Hegel, subjective spirits only develop in and through objective spirit, as the Divine Spirit only actualizes itself through its concrete human expressions, both communal and individual. Philosophical theology remains the supreme form of human activity; in fact, Hegel has assigned the history of philosophy an unprecedented place within the developing reality of God.[39]
Marx retained many structural features from Hegel’s philosophy of history. Under Feuerbach’s influence, however, he openly repudiated the Hegelian conception of God.[40] Deliberately reversing Hegel’s causal analysis, Feuerbach argued that the Judeo-Christian idea of God is an alienated projection of humanity’s unfulfilled historical potential. It is not God who actualizes the divine essence through natural and human creation, but alienated humans who reveal their restricted spiritual development by creating the idea of God. The only real, causally effective spirits are concrete human beings who pour their deepest hopes and longings into an external religious idea. Because their hopes have remained “abstract and unfulfilled,” humans have expressed them in compensatory theological fictions.
Marx also accepted Hegel’s belief in a historical process that develops dialectically towards actualized freedom. But he openly rejected the religious dimension of Hegelian thought. The socialized humanism Marx embraced is explicitly and defiantly atheistic. There are no divine agents; there are only alienated humans unable to recognize that they are the ultimate makers and masters of history. For Marx, all forms of religious humanism, including Hegel’s unorthodox theology, are products of an alienated humanity. In its different historical expressions, religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the soul of a heartless and soulless world, the opium of the people.”[41] The human need for religious consolation will decisively end, according to Marx, when human alienation is fully overcome, not through philosophical criticism but through revolutionary violence and action.
In 1841, several years after his exposure to Hegelian ideas in Berlin, Marx received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. His doctoral thesis was devoted to ancient Greek and Roman atomism. For Marx, as for the classical atomists who shaped his ontological naturalism, humans discover at the causal origin of the world not the God of creation, nor cosmic nous, nor absolute spirit, but the existence of chance and necessity. At the beginning of cosmic time, there is no ruling intelligence, but only lifeless, mindless matter and inexorable causal laws. Through the lawful motion of these mindless particles the world-order gradually arises and the natural universe becomes intelligible. For Marx, nature’s intelligibility exclusively depends on its law governed material structure.[42]
From the Jena period forward, Marx was a comprehensive naturalist in his metaphysical convictions. He accepted the causal primacy of matter in motion; he emphasized the animal body with its biological needs and demands; he endorsed the power of natural necessity as the mother of human invention. Human language, thought, and orderly social relations all gradually emerge from natural causes to satisfy basic bodily needs.[43] He scorned all forms of idealism and theology, Platonic, Christian, Kantian or Hegelian. In asserting the ontological primacy of spirit over matter, western philosophers had confused intelligible effects (ideas, concepts, intelligible forms) with their underlying physical or biological causes. This idealistic tendency was especially pronounced in Hegelian philosophy which attributed supreme explanatory power to the Absolute Idea and reduced the material universe to that idea’s derivative expression. For Marx, the only causally effective ideas are human creations which appear at a very late stage in nature’s evolutionary development.[44]
In Marx’s naturalistic narrative, human beings first emerge from sheer animality, not through reason, speech, contemplation or moral choice, but through engaging in productive labor. It is the evolution of agriculture from hunting and gathering societies that marks the first occurrence of the specifically human. The biological animal becomes a human being when it produces the means of its own subsistence.[45] By deliberately producing their own food, by no longer receiving it directly from natural sources, human beings began to humanize nature, to make it an instrument of their evolving needs and desires, to bring it increasingly under their social control. This evolving process of rationally guided material production is the clue to Marx’s defiant claim that labor, not God, had created man.
Marx’s ontological naturalism supported his reliance on economic causality in understanding human affairs. He focused his heuristic attention on patterns of economic development. For Marx, the basic economic activities are producing, distributing and consuming material goods. As economic history unfolds, humans develop their productive capacities by extending and refining their technical knowledge and skill. But growth in the forces of human production always occurs within a social matrix of ownership, control and distribution. These social relations of production and distribution are invariably characterized by exploitation and violence. The human struggle for existence historically advances within a societal framework where the strong dominate the weak. At the critical turning points in history, the weak successfully overthrow their economic masters, creating new patterns of oppression and conflict in their stead.[46]
In the Marxian story, the history of class struggle reached its definitive climax under capitalism. Never had the forces of production been so dynamic and powerful; never had the relations of production been so needlessly oppressive and inhuman. The bourgeoisie controlled unprecedented economic and political power; the urban working class controlled only the laboring potential of their individual bodies. Driven by the profit maximizing imperatives of capitalism, the industrial owners paid their workers minimum subsistence wages. This dehumanizing social condition starkly revealed the true basis of human alienation. Productive labor, the specifically humanizing capacity in history, had become, paradoxically, the root cause of alienation. Marx viewed the radical expansion of capitalist forces of production as a sign of genuine progress, made possible by the Baconian alliance of science and technology. It was, therefore, capitalist relations of production and the bourgeois ideologies invoked in their defense that needed to be unmasked and destroyed. The socialist revolution Marx predicted as a theorist, and demanded as a revolutionary, would begin with the critique of liberal ideology and culminate in the proletariat’s violent destruction of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionary violence would indeed be the midwife of history, since the goal of Marx’s philosophy is to abolish human alienation by identifying and eliminating its principal causes.
Marx’s philosophical anthropology precariously synthesizes many disparate cultural elements.[47] His socialized humanism seeks to combine: the scientific naturalism and materialism of the radical enlightenment, the pragmatic instrumentalism of Bacon, the world historical dialectic of Hegel, the Romantic aspiration to expressive unity and wholeness, the democratic struggle for greater equality and justice, the economic interpretation of history, the romantic and socialist critique of capitalism, the Jacobin commitment to revolutionary violence, prophetic concern for the victims of oppression, and the secular utopianism of the European left. Within his grand synthesis, distinct causal elements account for modern hope and disillusion. His ultimate goal is not explanatory adequacy but world transforming power. Marx’s revolutionary aim was to develop a science of human existence, discovering the laws of history in the political and ideological struggles among economic classes, before turning that explanatory science into an irresistible weapon of human equality and freedom.
“In the wake of the French Revolution, what we received was not ‘a new science of politics for a new world’ but a series of philosophies of history and of historical necessity.”[48]
What is the internal connection between Marx’s socialized humanism and his dialectical philosophy of history? Marx’s philosophical anthropology is strikingly explicit in what it affirms and denies. Intellectually rooted in enlightenment naturalism, in the disenchanted universe of modern physics, it openly rejects the Cartesian res cogitans, the disembodied rational subject. Within Marx’s scientific materialism there is no place for independent spiritual causes, whether human or divine. Human beings are not incarnate persons created in the image of the Biblical God. Their causal genesis and development are based entirely on natural processes; their proximate historical ancestors are the higher primates rather than the gods. In several respects, Marx is an ally of Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology. Both men are students of organic life and of the natural processes by which living organisms develop and change. Both treat human beings as complex animals immersed in the struggle for existence that dominates the biological universe. Both are more concerned with the human species as a whole than they are with the destinies of individual persons.[49]
For Marx, humans distinguish themselves from other animals through their productive labor. While non-human species find their means of subsistence within the natural universe, humans gradually produce their own food and shelter. Through their productive activity, they begin to humanize the natural world, to make the natural environment serve their changing needs and desires. Marx emphasizes that this species-defining labor is inherently social. Human beings produce the material conditions of their common life within historically determinate social settings. Marx agreed with the liberal economists that the production and exchange of material goods is the basis of human existence. But he strongly rejected the atomistic biases of liberalism. Human beings neither produce nor exchange in isolation, as solitary, self sufficient individuals. Rather, they produce with others and for others in diverse social frameworks historically demarcated by a specific set of property relations. The critical variables of human existence include the developing forces of production, the legalized ownership and control of productive resources and the patterned allocation of what is produced. The totality of these social relations, the specific manner in which ownership, control and distribution are organized, constitute the economic structure of society.[50]
Both the forces and relations of human production are historically variable. They change and develop over time, and they differ from one economic community to another. Individual human beings conduct their lives within a social and historical matrix over which they have limited control. For this reason, neither economic agents nor the social classes to which they belong are capable of significant autonomy. As situated laboring subjects, humans exercise their limited agency within an economic and natural environment they largely inherit. There is, of course, a reciprocal causality operating here. Both natural and historical forces shape the character of human existence, while the economic and political decisions of humans simultaneously transform nature and history. Still, Marx does not completely abandon the goal of human autonomy. While economic agents and the socioeconomic structures in which they produce and consume are conditioned by external causes, Marx insists that the definitive telos of history is the autonomy of the human species as a whole. Both the parallels and the contrasts with Hegelian teleology are striking. Hegel’s dialectic made the actualized freedom or autonomy of God depend on the contributions of subjective and objective spirits. The Hegelian God achieves fullness of being through the largely unreflective agency of his finite creations. Marx preserves Hegel’s dialectical teleology while deliberately naturalizing the causal agents in the historical process. Hegel’s finite spirits became Marx’s individual laborers; Hegel’s objective spirits became Marx’s socioeconomic classes; and the developing autonomy of absolute spirit is replaced by the universal liberation of the evolving human species.[51]
Hegel’s theology was heretical because he made human history a constitutive part of the divine reality. The rationally conceived God of Hegel is not eternal and unchanging perfection as in Christian metaphysics; God is rather the infinite spirit that fulfills its telos through historical struggle and human cooperation. Following Hegel’s example, Marx modeled the historicity of human nature on the pattern of the Hegelian God. For Marx, human nature is not a trans-historical, trans-cultural essence. It is neither created by God nor determined by exclusively natural causes. Unlike the immutable essences of classical metaphysics, human nature changes and develops through time in a lawful dialectical manner. For a classical thinker like Aristotle, human nature was always and everywhere the same. It aimed at an unchanging natural telos that only the virtuous few actually achieved. Individual development consisted in moving consistently towards that immutable and attainable goal. In a genuinely virtuous adult, like Socrates, the full potential of human nature was actually realized. Eudaimonia, Aristotle’s name for actualizing the human essence, was causally dependent on terrestrial nature, the political community, the deliberate cultivation of our highest natural capacities, as well as individual striving and excellence. Only through a common paideia, the education in art and virtue offered by the polis, were human animals transformed into full human beings.
In Marx’s revisionary anthropology, human nature is not fully actualized in exemplary individuals, however gifted or virtuous. The true subjects of historical becoming are not particular persons but economically structured societies. In any concrete historical period, human nature is constituted by supra-individual economic forces over which individual persons have minimal influence. The actual potential of human nature therefore is dynamically variable. It is measured historically by the level of productive capacity achieved in a particular socioeconomic order. This productive capacity is determined by both natural and human causes, but as history progresses and the economy develops the human causes become increasingly important. In the industrial societies of nineteenth century Europe, scientific knowledge, technological skill and systematically organized labor power had raised the productive potential of the species to unprecedented heights. Marx designated the scandalous contrast between the collective wealth of industrial societies and the oppressive poverty of their laboring class the central contradiction of capitalism.
For Marx, the economic interpretation of history is the key to a credible anthropology. To say that “labor created man” does not mean that the individual laborer creates himself, nor that a particular historical economy is entirely self-generated. Individual autonomy is inconsistent with human sociality and social autonomy with human historicity. Marx’s thesis of human self-creation is a provocative assertion about the evolving human species considered as a whole. Human beings collectively, in the course of their dialectical history, have transformed the natural universe through their developing knowledge and productive capacity. Now they are finally able to transform industrial society itself, so that it may express and embody rather than obstruct the universal aspirations of 1789. The actual completion of the French Revolution requires the destruction of capitalist relations of production and their replacement by a utopian socialist economy in which property is collectively owned and controlled.
Marx’s philosophy of history, like his socialized humanism, is also explicit in what it affirms and denies. What did Marx explicitly affirm in his theory of dialectical materialism?[52]
1. The economic structure of society, the social forces and relations of production, are the real causal determinants in history. On this economic foundation, the legal and political institutions of society are based. The substantive content of the law, the organization and operation of government, cannot be explained in isolation from political economy. Nor can the cultural beliefs and values that receive public expression in a society’s art, religion and philosophy be properly understood as autonomous. In Marx’s philosophy of history, as in his naturalized anthropology, the causal dynamic operates from below rather than above. It is economic causes that effectively determine institutional and cultural realities. As Marx memorably phrased it, “The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.”[53]
How radically should Marx’s assertion of economic determinism be read? It is reasonable to claim that a community’s political and cultural life cannot be understood in isolation from its economy. This is a sound heuristic principle for all forms of historical inquiry. But Marx’s more radical claim would require that economic causes uniquely determine the forms of government and legal protections within a community, as well as the philosophic convictions and religious allegiances of its leading citizens. Radical economic determinism is a provocative philosophical thesis, but it suffers from very limited plausibility.[54]
2. The historical development of a society’s forces of production heavily depends on human rationality, scientific, technological and economic. In this respect, the rational insights of individual thinkers, inventors, and planners already determine the character of social existence. At a predictable stage of development, however, the material forces of production begin to conflict with existing property relations. Productive relationships that had earlier enhanced the growth of capacity have now become obstacles to economic progress. They block historical development in two different ways. They fetter the expansion of economic growth, but they also obstruct the revolutionary drive towards productive and meaningful work, authentic citizenship, and satisfying leisure and liberty for all. Let us critically examine Marx’s commitment to economic growth. Would the creation of material abundance justly distributed guarantee full human development for every person? Or would it, rather, increase the probability of higher standards of living for the majority of those residing in affluent countries? Faced with Marx’s utopian optimism, we need to ask: Are there negative as well as positive consequences, human and environmental, to the modern project of unlimited economic growth?[55]
3. Violence is the midwife of history, of every old society pregnant with a new one. Marx was not a proponent of violence as such. To be effective, revolutionary violence must occur under highly specific economic conditions. Only when the developing forces and relations of production have become incompatible can a successful social revolution occur. But the relevant economic determinants are not by themselves sufficient. The oppressed class, the causal agents of the impending reversal, must acquire the appropriate revolutionary consciousness. They must liberate their minds from the reigning ideologies used to legitimate established power. They must realize collectively that the source of their alienation is the prevailing system of economic oppression. For Marx, it is futile to strike at the leadership of the state or the princes of the church while leaving the economic structure of society intact. True revolutionary change requires new relations of production, new collective forms of ownership, distribution and control. When the economic foundation of society has been transformed, then the institutional and cultural superstructures will inevitably follow.[56]
The dominant economic class will resist revolutionary change, not only politically and legally but ideologically as well. They will defend their privileged position with arms and ideas, using the coercive power of the state as well as its cultural resources to preserve the status quo. In this fierce and comprehensive struggle, the radical role of the revolutionary theorist is critical. He must awaken and discipline the oppositional consciousness of the oppressed. He can do this effectively only if guided by the Marxian science that discovers the dialectical laws of social change and reveals the ultimate telos of history. To shape the consciousness of the working class, the theorist must offer a causal and ideological critique of the existing society, articulating the economic causes of the workers’ alienation and unmasking the material interests behind specious defenses of the established order.
But the revolutionary leader must also discipline the hatred evoked by systemic injustice. The violent assault on existing symbols of power is useless, even counter-productive, if it occurs prematurely. The historical insights of dialectical materialism are therefore imperative, for no social order will collapse until its productive potential has been fully developed. Only when existing relations of production thwart economic growth can revolutionary violence become effective. Human history follows an invariant pattern of dialectical conflict that successful revolutionaries must learn to obey. To become the masters and makers of history, human beings must learn to comply with its laws.[57]
Hegel structured his theory of history around the “cunning of reason.” He clearly distinguished the infinite purpose of absolute spirit from the particular goals and passions of historical individuals. Infinite spirit was cunning in using the passions and interests of concrete human beings to achieve its own ends, ends beyond the awareness of the contributing agents. Only in the reflective knowledge of the Hegelian philosopher does the cunning of divine reason reach full human consciousness. In contemplating history as a whole, Hegel discovered the essential role human agents and societies have played in achieving the hidden purposes of God.[58]
A parallel process occurs in Marx’s dialectical materialism. All references to the divine are excluded, but Marx’s historical telos, though now fully naturalized, is no less ambitious than Hegel’s. The autonomy of the collective human species has replaced the autonomy of God. But a biological species is not a conscious intentional agent capable of thinking and planning for itself. Although Marx recognizes only human causation in history, until now the decisive agents of change, scientific theorists and inventors, productive laborers and social revolutionaries, have not really known what they were doing. The dialectical laws of history have operated through and yet beyond human influence. Like Hegel, Marx is committed to a dialectical necessity in history that requires human effort while transcending individual recognition and purpose.[59]
Only the scientific historian can discover this remorseless dialectic. But for Marx, the critical revolutionary, this momentous disclosure is not meant to remain unproductive. The true purpose of philosophy is to understand world history in order to master it. Guided by the insights of Marxian science and carefully attuned to the cunning of history, revolutionary leaders cooperate with dialectical necessity by directing the class struggle towards universal fulfillment.
A profound paradox lies at the heart of Marx’s materialism. Like his political rivals, the capitalist bourgeoisie, Marx embraced the imperial assumptions of economics. He affirmed the primacy of material interests in human motivation and social dynamics. Yet he deviated from classical liberalism by emphasizing the economic interests of historical classes rather than the individual pursuit of material gain. To support this critical anthropological shift, he replaced Adam Smith’s benevolent “invisible hand” with the Hegelian inspired “cunning of history.” For Marxists, as for classical liberals, the well being of the communal whole is mysteriously achieved through the narrow self-interest of its parts. Marx differs, of course, from his bourgeois antagonists, insisting that the collective good will only be achieved at the end of history, when the material interests of the proletariat coincide with the aims of the whole human species. Still, it is not the moral aspirations of the proletariat that drive them to revolt but the pursuit of their collective self-interest. Marx stresses that the proletariat is historically unique because it is the first social class whose material interests coincide with the causal requirements of human emancipation as such.[60] He therefore believes that the proletarian victory over the bourgeoisie will not be just another revolt in an endless historical series. On the contrary, the overthrow of capitalism and the emergence of a communist society are celebrated as the climax of human history. Why? Because this apocalyptic transformation will miraculously: create the social conditions for unfettered economic development; bring the history of class struggle and human exploitation to a close; destroy human alienation in all of its forms (concretely, this will mean the end of capitalism, the abolition of the state and the elimination of cultural ideologies);enable all members of the species to actualize their full potential as workers, citizens and individually creative species beings.[61]
For Marx, these utopian outcomes are not romantic dreams but scientific certainties, guaranteed by a theory of history whose economic premises are immune from critical suspicion and whose dialectical structure creates universal harmony out of continuous historical strife. The proletariat functions in Marxist prophecy as a messianic class whose paradoxical role is to achieve utopian ends though dystopian means. Is this yet another dialectical paradox or a practically repugnant contradiction? To embrace Marx’s vision of history, we need to believe that freedom only emerges through dialectical necessity, peace through revolutionary violence and genuine autonomy through centuries of collective alienation.[62]
“Marx’s political economy is built on the inevitable collapse of capitalism.”[63]
What is capitalism, the form of modern political economy Karl Marx admired and abhorred? How should we understand and appraise its existence as a complex historical phenomenon? To begin at the most basic level, capitalism is a dynamic and evolving economic system based on private ownership of property, the voluntary production and exchange of goods and services, a market-based allocation of resources, and shared acceptance of the profit motive as the engine of economic life. An important symbiosis exists between capitalist theory and practice, for capitalist theories explain and to some extent justify the economic behavior of individuals, social classes, international corporations and governmental institutions, both national and global. Several competing theories correspond to the different forms of capitalism, but the great majority are versions of economic liberalism. Capitalism, like bourgeois liberalism its political partner and ally, is best understood as an historical construct of western modernity.[64]
In classical Greece, ‘economics’ referred to the art of household management. Although the Greek cities actively traded across the Mediterranean basin, economic life primarily occurred within the oikos, the private household. The oikos was a sphere of structural inequality where the male householder ruled over slaves, women and children. It was also a sphere governed by biological necessity where the requirements of life and shelter were regularly satisfied.[65] The emergence of a distinctively modern economy corresponds to the birth of the nation state. In western Europe, from the Italian Renaissance forward, economic activity gradually moved out of the private household and into the public marketplace. The domestic economy of the modern family became increasingly dependent on the political economy of the national household. This novel dependence was part of a revolutionary transformation that overturned the social and political structures of the West.
At the onset of modernity, agriculture was the primary economic activity, and the landed gentry the dominant economic and political class. By the end of the eighteenth century, trade and finance had replaced agriculture as sources of national wealth, and the political rivalry between bourgeois merchants and bankers and the landed nobility had become intense. In Great Britain, France, Germany and North America, a market economy slowly developed in which land, labor and capital became objects of commercial exchange. During the feudal period, the essence of private property had been the ancestral home and estate of a multigenerational family. The family dwelling was an important source of historical continuity, providing a tangible space of privacy, shelter and intimacy for family members over many generations. These private domestic properties marked the spatial boundary and limit of public authority and law. The private home was a visibly recognized, spatially limited enclosure suffused with common memories and meaning.[66]
The commercialization of private property radically changed its cultural significance. Commercial property is essentially real estate, an objective commodity like any other to be bought and sold for profit. Like other commodities, its monetary value depends on constant fluctuations in supply and demand. Taken together, the gradual emergence of a market economy, popular acceptance of the exchange market as a/the primary public institution, the reconception of all physical objects as potential commodities, constitute a major historical event. During the mid to late eighteenth century, Western Europe embraced a new conception of land and property, a new set of relations between individuals and their families, a new attitude to profit and gain. Homo mercator, the capitalist merchant, became the cultural symbol of this emerging commercial mentality.[67]
What was the governing ethos of homo mercator? Then and now it was an individualist mindset. Human beings enter the commercial marketplace as private individuals intent on advancing their enlightened self interest. Buyers and sellers constantly engage in competitive social relations as each tries to profit at the expense of the other. The deliberate pursuit of individual profit is guided by calculative reason, as merchants and their customers seek to maximize personal gain. Homo mercator consistently prizes a negative conception of liberty, the freedom of individuals to buy and sell, to trade and barter, without restrictive interference by political or ecclesiastical authority.[68]
Important cultural backing for the commercial mentality came from its religious and intellectual allies. The Protestant reformers accepted the market economy as a critical part of their struggle with the landed gentry. Supporters of democracy admired the apparent meritocracy of the market, its institutional independence of inherited power and privilege. French liberal thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire and Constant openly praised the virtues of “le doux commerce,” endorsing the commercial mentality in its cultural struggle with the warrior ethic of feudalism. For these economic liberals, the aristocratic ethos had been barbaric and warlike, a recurrent source of death, bodily injury and devastated property. The commercial ethic, by contrast, was pacific and conciliatory, softening manners and speech and greatly expanding public and personal wealth.[69]
The most influential defender of homo mercator and the market economy was the Scottish theorist, Adam Smith. In the Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that the unregulated commerce of the market place, where producers, merchants and customers freely sought their economic advantage, provided an effective impersonal control over prices and wages, a control that ultimately benefited both commercial participants and the national economy as a whole. It was unwise and unprofitable for any public authority, political or religious, to seek to regulate market transactions. Why? Because there existed “an invisible hand” lawfully guaranteeing that public benefit would flow from the commercial pursuit of private gain. Later liberal theorists generalized Smith’s defense of commercial laissez faire, converting his economic apology for rational egoism into a comprehensive theory of social and political order. The enlightened pursuit of self-interest soon became a universal moral imperative, displacing the passion for public justice as the basis of a good society.[70]
European capitalism took a decisive turn after the French Revolution. The alliance of scientific discoveries with their technical applications dramatically increased the productive capacity of the national economies. Rapid technological innovation and the extension of financial credit to emerging industrial enterprises also enhanced economic productivity. Wage labor became cheap and abundant as vast numbers of European peasants abandoned the rural economy to seek work in the new urban factories. The rise of the factory system intensified the historic societal shift to urban industrial settings. The disciplined artistry of the Renaissance craftsman (homo faber) skillfully producing durable objects for a limited patronage, was steadily replaced by the mass production of urban laborers, creating cheap commodities for an expanding international market.
Industrial capitalism differed in scale and character from its commercial predecessor. Although the profit motive remained dominant, new economic agents and institutions had entered the competitive field. Late nineteenth century capitalists required vast sums of money and credit to purchase the machinery and replicate the innovations of the industrial economy. The constant need for credit magnified the importance of bankers, financiers and private speculators, the indispensable middle men who bankrolled new factories and equipment and invested their capital in larger and riskier economic enterprises. The urban labor force, however, remained largely unskilled. Because many workers had recently left the great landed estates, their new jobs were deliberately simplified to meet the requirements of mass production.
The public image of industrial capitalism was far less benign than Adam Smith’s flattering portrait of private individuals freely engaged in commercial exchange. The intense competition to accumulate capital and to maximize profit forced many business owners into bankruptcy. But the greatest harm was suffered by the urban working class who labored long hours under dangerous conditions for subsistence wages. Cheap labor confined to repetitive tasks in crowded and unsafe factories meant poverty and exhaustion for the working family but unprecedented wealth and power for factory owners and their financial supporters. When the glaring inequities created by capitalism brought vehement cries for reform, capitalist owners evoked the liberal ideology of laissez faire to oppose governmental intervention on behalf of the workers. In the jaundiced eyes of the bourgeoisie, all forms of private property (economic capital) were sacred; government should never intervene in economic affairs; and the benevolent effects of profit would eventually work to everyone’s advantage. The operation of “the invisible hand” guaranteed the success of unfettered capitalism in the long term.[71]
The disciples of the French Revolution, however, were haunted by a despair driven question. What had happened to the original promise of liberty, equality and fraternity for all? The aristocratic defenders of the ancien regime had been weakened, the urban bourgeoisie had politically supplanted the landed gentry, the caste structure of feudal society had been destroyed, but the new capitalist inequities were even more intolerable than the old. Under the ancien regime, there were traditional ties and obligations joining noble to peasant; there were strong bonds of loyalty and affection between the king and his subjects; there was the reassuring familiarity and mutual support available in rural communities. These sustaining human connections had been destroyed by the impersonal logic of the market, the unlimited pursuit of capital, the wretchedness of the urban working class, and the implacable ideology of rational egoism and laissez faire. Understandably, factory workers, miners and industrial laborers began to organize and resist; radical socialist leaders challenged the sacred claims of private property; and democratic reformers struggled to extend the suffrage to workers and peasants and to enlist government support for the poor and oppressed. The bitter many leveled struggle between European labor and capital was now fully engaged.[72]
This very brief synopsis of Europe’s economic history helps to contextualize Marx’s critique of capitalism. It is important to remember that Marx was a secular European of the mid-nineteenth century, a passionate man who had lived in Germany, the Low Countries, France and Great Britain. A man who had studied Hegelian philosophy, French social theory and British political economy, and who had witnessed directly the misery and oppression of industrial society. A radical intellectual of the European left, Marx was openly allied with the socialist movement and with the revolutionary opposition to bourgeois society. To understand and appreciate his hostility to capitalism, we need to know: what he explicitly opposed; what motivated his intense opposition; the rational core of his criticism; and the alternative socio- economic order he advocated.
Marx’s comprehensive critique has three principal targets: industrial capitalism as an economic system, the politics and culture of bourgeois society and the liberal ideology embraced by capitalist owners, bourgeois politicians, and their cultural allies and apologists. Marx was deeply ambivalent about industrial capitalism as an economic system. He accepted capitalism as a necessary phase of human economic development. It had radically enlarged the forces of production and was the greatest source of material progress in the history of the world. But it had clearly outlived its provisional utility and needed to disappear into history. Industrial capitalism had created a pattern of social relations that were profoundly unjust and inhuman. These structural inequities sustained new forms of despotism in Europe; not the tyranny of the ancien regime but the despotism of bourgeois society that constantly oppressed its most productive members. The bourgeois oppression of labor was evident in: restricted ownership of capital and the forces of production; the dehumanizing influence of money and wealth; the idolatry of profit; the material and spiritual impoverishment of the working class.[73]
Why had bourgeois societies and European governments callously resisted reform? Marx interpreted the blindness and cruelty of the bourgeoisie through deterministic principles. In the Marxian dialectic, each social class is governed by its perceived self-interest. The privileged classes in every age inevitably seek to preserve and expand their wealth and power. They habitually ignore, deny or feebly justify the social mutilation caused by their economic behavior. Their engrained self-deception is buttressed by explicit ideologies that rationalize social cruelty as the necessary consequence of inviolable economic laws. To undermine the institutions of capitalism, Marx thought it imperative to discredit the ideology legitimating the capitalist order.[74]
Classical liberalism, first proposed in defense of commercial capitalism, had extended its protective umbrella to the industrial societies of nineteenth century Europe. Liberalism was an atomistic ideology with limited relevance to an industrial economy based on economic and social interdependence.[75] Marx began his critique by challenging the liberal myth of individual autonomy. Bourgeois owners of industrial capital were not autonomous economic agents, but favorably situated businessmen heavily dependent for their success on scientific discoveries, technological innovation, accessible credit, cheap labor, and steadily expanding commercial markets. The productive laborers they exploited also depended on forces and relations of production over which they had limited control.[76]
Marx argued that classical liberals were also insensitive to history. Liberal economists believed that the laws governing industrial society were invariant and universal. Concerted attempts to redress the inequities of capitalism were pointless, for economic inequalities inevitably resulted from impersonal laws human beings were unable to change. Marx insisted that liberal theorists with their ignorance of history, had overlooked the dialectical process through which economic laws arise and are eventually destroyed.[77]
He then extended his critique to bourgeois notions of freedom. Liberal theories of freedom consistently espoused negative liberty, the absence or prevention of public interference in private economic activity. Under this banner of liberty, capitalist production, exchange and consumption were evidently free activities, since capital and labor had been left to themselves to do as they pleased. Marx criticized negative liberty as an ideological myth. Both capital and labor were regularly subject to governing forces that largely determined their economic behavior. Capitalists were constrained by the relentless competition for profit in the industrial economy. Their workers faced the even harsher necessity of sustaining their families on subsistence wages in a merciless labor market.[78]
Classical liberals had also predicted the benevolent results of unfettered competition. Autonomous individuals responding energetically to the profit motive would create through their efforts increasing public wealth and a constantly improved standard of living. Marx’s prophetic critique of capitalism explicitly rejected the idolatry of profit, the dehumanizing influence of money and wealth, and the imaginary benefits of unlimited market competition. For Marx it was the ruthless competition for profit that drove capitalist owners into bankruptcy and kept industrial laborers in extreme deprivation.[79]
What motivated Marx’s systematic study and critique of capitalism? It is difficult to assess any thinker’s personal motives; in Marx’s case the difficulty is compounded by complexity of character and diversity of formative influences. That said, we can identify several concerns that fueled his relentless critique. Marx was a utopian thinker with extravagant hopes for human liberation and fulfillment. From his perspective, industrial capitalism thwarted the legitimate aspirations of the French Revolution. It subverted traditional values and social institutions; and transformed everything humanly significant into marketable commodities for commercial exchange. It celebrated the lust for profit and smugly accepted working class deprivation as the price of collective wealth. For Marx the utopian secular humanist, capitalism was deeply and irremediably dehumanizing.[80]
Marx was also a prophetic moralist, even though he denied the efficacy of moral causes in history. He sincerely believed that capitalism depended on the unjust exploitation of labor, that it compounded the avoidable scandal of poverty with the pervasive misery of the industrial proletariat. His moral critique of capitalist property relations is a forceful demand for distributive justice in allocating the benefits and burdens of industrial society. His personal hostility to bourgeois society also has a prophetic edge. The complacency and heartlessness of the bourgeoisie are particularly appalling to Marx, the secular prophet and revolutionary champion of the oppressed.[81]
As a philosopher of history, Marx saw bourgeois capitalism as the dominant economic reality of the modern age. It had destroyed the Ancien Regime, dramatically enlarged mankind’s productive capacity, and transformed the institutional and cultural life of Europe. But as a dynamic economic system it had exhausted its historical energy. Capitalism had ceased to be a progressive force and now functioned as a barrier to economic growth. The cunning of history no power can resist demanded its abolition and replacement.[82]
As a critical economist, Marx was certain that capitalism would destroy itself. Its underlying dynamic, the relentless drive to maximize profit and accumulate capital, would inevitably lead to economic collapse. Through intense competition, the ownership clas would steadily shrink; the proletarian class of wage laborers would continue to expand while remaining impoverished, unable to purchase the stream of commodities they regularly produced. Thus the capitalist economy would eventually implode due to excessive supply and insufficient demand. Simply by adhering to its own laws of development, capitalism was fatally doomed.[83]
In Marx’s self-presentation, the scientific historian and critical economist clearly supercede the utopian humanist and secular prophet. Economic determinism and dialectical necessity are repeatedly invoked to convert Marx’s moral concerns into ostensibly scientific predictions. This reductive strategy satisfies the explanatory constraints of historical materialism, while enabling Marx to conceal his moral indignation and utopian hopes under an impartial mask. A passionate moral and political critique of capitalism is misleadingly presented as disinterested scientific analysis.[84]
For the sake of argument, let us grant Marx the causal significance he assigns to collective egoism and dialectical laws. Given these assumptions, what are his basic objections to capitalism as an economic system? The chief criticism is that capitalist success depends on the alienation of productive labor and the laboring class. But for Marx productive labor is the supreme expression of human identity, the specific way humans distinguish themselves from the other animals. Labor enables human beings to master nature and increase their control over mankind’s historical destiny. Only by liberating labor’s productive capacity can the full species potential of humanity be achieved. Creating networks of social cooperation among wage laborers throughout the world is an essential part of this dialectical process. The global solidarity of labor will accelerate the fulfillment of the revolutionary ideals, bringing the telos of history to completion.[85]
Alienated labor, capitalist labor, does not promote self-fulfillment but dehumanizing poverty and estrangement. Subsistence wages prevent the laboring class from escaping biological necessity. Industrial patterns of production confine the laboring process to a repetitive cycle of boredom and drudgery. Intense competition for jobs in a precarious labor market makes industrial workers economic rivals rather than fraternal allies. And capitalist patterns of distribution prevent workers from owning and enjoying the objects they have produced. How can such productive activity and collective effort yield so inhuman a result?[86]
The principal cause of alienated labor is the capitalist commitment to maximizing profit. Paradoxically, profit is the sacred idol of capitalism and the avenging angel that will eventually destroy it. But what are the sources of economic profit, and how does Marx explain their contradictory role in a capitalist economy? To answer these questions we shall contrast Marx’s labor theory of value with the analysis of prices and wages offered by classical liberalism.[87] For liberal economists, the market price of an object is determined by supply and demand. No exchangeable commodity has an inherent value, a value independent of human needs and desires. What an object costs in a commercial exchange is a function of what other buyers are willing to pay for it. If the supply of a commodity is great and demand is small, prices will decline; conversely, if demand is great and supply is small, prices will predictably rise. Enlightened self-interest leads buyers and sellers to adapt their economic behavior to prevailing market conditions. If free and unfettered exchange can be reliably assumed, this alternating process should lead, over time, to an impersonal equilibrium of prices favorable to the enlightened and patient consumer.
The liberal account of a commodity’s market value is inherently relativistic. The price of an exchange object basically depends on how badly other people want it. In challenging liberal economic theory, Marx wanted to assign all human commodities an objective or intrinsic value. As a scientific economist, he wanted the source of an object’s measurable value to be mathematically quantifiable. As a critic of capitalism, he wanted his theory of value to explain the coexistence of profit and poverty within a capitalist economy.
Marx’s labor theory of value is based on the following premises:[88]
The true price of a commodity is its objective value.
The objective value of all commodities is ultimately reducible to the amount of labor it takes to produce them.
What the individual laborer owns and brings to the capitalist exchange market is his labor power, his personal capacity to produce exchangeable goods.
What the individual capitalist owns is a determinate share of the forces of production. This joint ownership gives the capitalist employer decisive control over the jobs the laborer needs to exist.
Rival capitalists are engaged in an intense competition to maximize profits, a merciless competition in which only the fittest survive.
But how does the capitalist’s profit emerge if all genuine value is based upon the activity of labor?
Under capitalism, every conceivable object is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold.
In the capitalist labor market, the economic value of a worker is determined by the wages he accepts from the capitalist employer for his productive labor and time.
The capitalist is driven by the profit motive and by the competitive demands of his rivals to pay the laborer merely subsistence wages, only what the laborer needs to survive while continuing to produce.
Thus a critical gap opens between the labor time needed to produce an exchangeable object and the legally contracted time for which the laborer is actually paid. The surplus value the laborer creates is the uncompensated labor that is present in the objects produced.
But the finished objects belong to the capitalist owner who then sells them for their true (objective) value and thus realizes a profit.
For Marx, the only objective and quantifiable source of profit in capitalist exchanges is the surplus labor value appropriated by the owner for which the laborer is never compensated.
The profit of the capitalist is only achieved at the expense of the laborer. Capitalists grow rich by deliberately keeping their workers poor. But for Marx, this clearly exploitative process is governed by economic imperatives rather than by moral choice. While the biological needs of the laborer force him/her to participate in the unequal exchange, the capitalist is driven to exploit the laborer by the economic demands of the system. To survive economically in a competitive market, he must maximize profits, cut costs, resort to labor-saving machinery, and drive down the wages of his workers. Marx believed that as capitalism evolved, machines would replace human beings as sources of production, the rate of profit would fall, bankruptcies would increase, the working class would become increasingly impoversished and hostile, and the cunning of history would lead to the destruction of capitalism and the idolatry of profit that animated it.[89]
For Marx, no internal reforms can save capitalism from itself. The ownership class is severely constrained by the competition for profit; bourgeois governments will resist economic and social reforms because they function as servants of the dominant class; as workers become destitute under capitalism, their self-interest drives them to oppose the system with radical fervor. Once the economic benefits of capitalism have been achieved, the dialectic of history will require the system’s extinction.
To what will the abolition of capitalism lead? Marx believes it will lead to new socialized relations of production. Private ownership of capital will be replaced by collective control of the forces of production.[90] What collective control means concretely (how economic decisions will actually be made and how distributive justice will be reliably guaranteed) is exceedingly vague. In practice, socialism has usually meant state control of the economy. The public officials, planners and managers of the socialist state, acting as the declared representatives of the people, make the critical economic decisions: expropriating private property; controlling wages and prices; determining what should be produced, under what conditions, by whom and for how long. Although Marx seemed to favor some form of economic democracy, where workers would function as planners, producers, distributors and consumers, unlimited state control has actually meant a dangerous concentration of economic and political power. The heartless despotism of the bourgeoisie has typically been replaced by the bureaucratic despotism of state managers and planners, putatively acting on the people’s behalf.[91]
Why should the oppression of industrial society be miraculously ended by abolishing private property and repudiating the profit motive? Marx believed he had found the key to resolving the “social question,” the scandalous mixture of deprivation and wealth in modern society. Capitalism was an agent of historical progress because it enormously developed the forces of production. But it generated profound alienation and misery due to the exploitative property relations it created. To Marx it seemed evident that collective ownership and control of the economy would preserve the advantages of capitalism while permanently destroying human alienation.[92]
Material abundance cooperatively shared and fraternally distributed would finally eliminate class struggle. A classless society would also mean a stateless society and an end to political oppression and violence. Without economic and political oppression, there would be no human need for false consciousness and ideology. After millennia of hostility and struggle, after centuries of self-interested behavior, after ages of systemic deceit and rationalization, the godlike potential of humanity would finally be realized. If the telos of history can only be actualized by destroying capitalism, if the secular hopes of the species depend on a socialist order, then the friends of humanity must rally to the Marxian cause: let the decisive revolution begin.
“The moderns look at action, at ethics and politics, from the perspective of a productive knowledge permeated with theory.”[93]
Let us return to the Arendtian appraisal of Marx, seeking the sources of their affinity and opposition. Arendt perceived Marx as a distinctively modern thinker, attuned to modern realities and imbued with modern assumptions and prejudices. He embraced secularization, the exclusive commitment to human life on this earth and this world. He rejected philosophical and religious idealism, dismissing the quest for God and eternal life as illusory diversions rooted in oppressive social conditions. Once humanity’s secular aspirations were met, all longing for the divine would completely disappear.
Marx also endorsed the modern reversal of the classical ethical hierarchies. He glorified what the ancients had disparaged and criticized what they had openly prized. His polemical critique of the vita contemplativa had two related dimensions. He scorned the ideal of disinterested knowledge, the understanding of reality pursued for its own sake, insisting that all human thinking occurred in the service of material interest and need. As biological animals, humans use reason for specifically practical ends. They seek to improve their living conditions, to produce fruits and works in abundance, rather than leaving reality as they have found it. Human thinking revolts against the natural and historical given rather than gratefully accepting its intelligible order and beauty.[94]
Marx combined his objections to the contemplative life with a strong affirmation of the vita activa. The limited dignity of theory depended entirely on its subordination to praxis. For Marx, humans are essentially active beings who develop their productive capacities and social connections by transforming the sensible world. Modern praxis deliberately changes the natural and historical given, humanizing the sensible world by making it progressively amenable to human desire and need.
Marx emphasized two types of transformative praxis: productive labor that humanizes nature by bringing its causal forces under human control, and revolutionary action (strategic violence) which humanizes society by reshaping the web of economic relations within which production occurs. Human labor and violence are glorified, in part, because they transform the order of nature and the structure of social existence. As a romantic expressivist, Marx also celebrated their transformative effect on human agency itself. By radically reshaping the sensible world, human beings recreate their species, in the sense that they dramatically expand their collective power and freedom. This dialectical process of species self-creation is extremely complex. Real human freedom is only enlarged through historical struggle and conflict. The expressive development of the species occurs through severe alienation, as the historical sources of human fulfillment are also the causes of human oppression. There is no way to actualize the telos of humanity apart from the dialectic of transformative praxis, radical alienation, and the violent overcoming of alienation that culminates in concord and peace.
Marx’s commitment to the dialectical process adds complexity to his critical stance. From the terminal perspective of the classless society, the historical forces and relations of production have consistently been unjust. Productive labor has always been exploited; the ruling class has always been oppressive and ideological. But the dialectical movement to actualized freedom requires these alienated forms of production and governance. They belong inescapably to the lawful dynamic of history.
In Marx’s anthropology, human history begins with needy biological animals and culminates in a species that is godlike in power. As a committed atheist, Marx repudiates both the Biblical and the Hegelian conceptions of God, crediting the human race with Promethean self-creation. The full realization of the species requires collective autonomy and mastery of nature and society. At the climax of history, nothing remains to resist the unified will and unlimited power of humankind.[95]
The beginning of history is the antithesis of the ideally projected end. The biological animals who first engage in productive labor have minimal power and freedom; for them the dream of Promethean autonomy is inconceivable. They are immersed in the struggle for existence with limited resources at their command. Marx wants to explain naturalistically how starting with so little the human race can achieve so much. His evolutionary naturalism credits the original humans with material needs and limited abilities. The philosophical and political capacities prized by the ancients, capacities that allow for sustained self-transcendence, are deliberately excluded from the Marxian story. The dialectical trick is to show how without disinterested reason (nous) and deliberative logos, without the classical virtues of intellect and character, and relying solely on transformative praxis driven by need, human beings can fulfill their extraordinary secular destiny.
Hannah Arendt was deeply critical of Marx’s “political philosophy.” In this section we shall focus on three principal targets of her criticism: Marx’s reductive anthropology, his deterministic conception of politics, and his ideological philosophy of history. While Arendt welcomed Marx’s support for the vita activa, she thought he conflated important distinctions within it. She accused Marx of blurring the distinction between labor and work, between productive activity that satisfies biological requirements and productive activity that builds and maintains a stable and durable world.[96] By emphasizing the life process of the species, Marx diminished the worldliness of human beings and overlooked their essential plurality. These two reductions are related, for Arendt, because only in an historically created world and a web of free action and speech can humans actualize their individual uniqueness and become capable of personal distinction.
Moreover, building a common and durable world and freely inserting oneself into the human web are essentially different activities. For Arendt the celebrated Marxian concept of praxis conflates or assimilates human production and action. While the forms of the vita activa belong together, since they are all sensible activities that change the phenomenal world, they do so in strikingly different ways. Labor transforms natural resources into objects of human consumption thereby sustaining the metabolism of life. Work transforms natural entities into durable artifacts that serve as the basis of a multi-generational world. Action and speech first establish and then transform the associative connections among human beings. By conflating labor and work, Marx effaced the Arendtian distinction between life and world (the distinction that, for Arendt, marks the true emergence of humanity). For Marx, animals become human when they produce their own means of biological subsistence; for Arendt, they become human when they cooperatively build a world in which successive generations can dwell and act. While the labor of the body and the work of one’s hands are both productive activities, they produce different kinds of sensible objects and respond to strikingly different human concerns.[97]
By conflating productive activity with cooperative action, Marx made coercive violence rather than public liberty the historical essence of politics. Both the lawful violence of the ruling class and the emancipatory violence of the revolutionary opposition are modeled on human fabrication. In the fabrication process, natural materials are consistently refashioned to comply with preconceived ideas. The point of making is utilitarian, forcing nature to serve the aims of artisans and their clients. In the artisan’s work, nature is accorded no independent dignity; it is treated as a manipulable resource to exploit however humans desire. Arendt repeatedly warned against transferring the logic of fabrication into the conduct of politics. Whenever that transfer occurs, political agents typically see themselves as remaking the future society in the same way engineers construct buildings and bridges. A preferred architectural model determines the planned transformation, and recalcitrant human materials are molded to accord with the architect’s will.[98]
This recurrent temptation is magnified when revolutionaries believe they are acting in the name of historical necessity. If there were an historical telos to be actualized through revolutionary violence, and that telos could be known in advance by the Marxian theorist, then revolutionary agents would become Promethean “makers of history” by remodeling bourgeois society to comply with the utopian plan. Under these highly inflated assumptions, the only way to achieve justice and liberty would be to reject political reform and to embrace infallibly guided strategic violence. The practical result of Marx’s anthropological errors are the dangerous dialectical paradoxes in which peace comes through violence, freedom through lawful necessity, and fraternal equality through unscrupulous manipulation.[99]
Arendt acknowledged that Marx was a secular humanist deeply committed to human greatness and liberty. But his political philosophy cleared a path for ideology and terror. Why did Marx’s legacy diverge so radically from his humanistic aspirations? Three contributing factors were clearly at work: his reductive anthropology, his violence based conception of politics, his deterministic theory of history. Let us briefly explore Arendt’s objections to these core elements in Marx’s Promethean humanism.[100]
Marx incorporated the antipolitical prejudices of modernity into his philosophical anthropology. As an evolutionary naturalist, he conceived of human beings as biological animals engaged in the struggle for existence. His anthropology focused not on individual persons, nor the free historical communities they establish, but on the developing life of the species. In opposing bourgeois individualism, Marx radically socialized human beings. He situated them within economic classes, confining their effective motivation to the dominant material interests of their class. Both the biological naturalism and the class-based analysis have a leveling and reductive effect. Neither perspective allows for a plurality of free persons capable of intellectual and political self-transcendence. The free Arendtian citizen (the singular and irreplaceable who), the complex web of mutual action and speech, and the sheltering world of durable artifacts and dwellings are all conspicuously absent from the Marxian story. In Arendt’s terms, the free republican citizen actively devoted to the commonweal has been replaced by a worldless animal laborans, politically vulnerable to loneliness, ideology, and the lure of mass movements.[101]
Marx also embraced the imperial assumptions of economics. He asserted the causal primacy of productive labor and the teleological primacy of material abundance and species autonomy. He elevated productive labor to the defining human capacity, the specific difference that raised human animals above the unthinking brutes. Labor was glorified because of its productive fertility, its ability to meet and exceed evolving human needs. It was the original example of transformative praxis that began human history and sustained the dialectical movement to species autonomy. Indeed, Marx measured historical progress in terms of labor’s fecundity as the developing forces of production increased collective power and mastery, while transforming human need and desire.[102]
Arendt rejected Marx’s economic imperialism. She opposed the primacy of economics both causally and teleologically. Nor did she regard the steady expansion of consumable objects as the true measure of historical progress. She denied that the history of freedom followed a discernible path lawfully bound to material abundance and productive fertility. Arendt treated Marx as the most influential advocate of the “social” mentality, the reductive confinement of human existence within the parameters of the life process. Within the narrow horizon of the “social,” all sensible realities eventually become objects of species consumption.[103] Arendt is especially critical of Marx’s biological naturalism. From the biological perspective, material production and consumption are repetitive processes that follow the cyclical patterns of nature. However, Marx thinks of labor not only biologically but also in romantic expressivist terms. Thus he treats labor not as repetitive and cyclical but as historical and anthropologically creative. In his revisionary narrative, labor is the engine of history. Beyond meeting recurrent and evolving needs, “labor” produces the tools and machines that exponentially magnify the forces of production. As productivity increases, the material burdens of labor diminish, until the laboring class enjoys the activities of leisure traditionally reserved for the ruling elite.[104]
While Arendt’s analysis of labor emphasizes its consumable products and repetitive cycles, Marx celebrates labor’s transformative effect on the human producers themselves. On his socialized version of expressivist theory, productive laborers actualize their historical potential through a complex dialectical process. Initially they express their creative capacity in some sensible external object (initially objects of consumption, but later objects of capital accumulation). However, they fail to recognize their expanding creativity due to the oppressive social relations they collectively create (in the alienated stage of production, laborers are estranged from their own productive capacities, from their co-producers, and from the objects they jointly produce). At the climax of history, they overcome their alienation through transformative revolutionary violence, the violent praxis in which they overthrow capitalism and usher in the classless society. Arendtian labor is the cyclical activity of individual human beings producing and consuming their means of subsistence. Marxian labor is the historical activity of a self-creating species that develops its collective power and freedom by abolishing both natural and social alienation.[105]
Marx’s concept of productive labor spans the gamut of the vita activa.[106] Initially it produces objects of material consumption; then it produces technical objects of use, like tools and machines; finally it “produces” a harmonious web of socialized relations completely purged of capitalist alienation. Through this increasingly diversified “production,” labor supposedly creates the human species itself. To assert that “labor created man” is to claim that human beings have transformed themselves from the humble servants of nature to the proud masters of all they survey. Obviously, no individual person or social community could plausibly make this claim. Marx’s thesis is only intelligible if we conceive of the evolving species as a single creative agent actualizing its autonomy on the model of the Hegelian God. But Marx’s illusion of total creativity ignores the natural reality that persists through the historical process. Human beings, even the human species if we grant Marx its fictional agency, never create ex nihilo. They always depend, to varying degrees, on natural forces that resist complete humanization.[107]
Arendt rejects Marx’s socialized humanism because it is too reductive and too grand. It is reductive in its causal reliance on evolutionary naturalism and economic imperialism. It is far too grand in its Promethean aspirations and epistemic illusions. The great weakness of Marx’s anthropology is what it excludes from the human condition: free and independent individual thinking, disinterested theoretical insight, the multiple forms of human cognition not driven by need and material interest; interpersonal dialogue and persuasive speech, public spirited cooperative action, the political solidarity of mature citizens; world building craftsmanship, a rectilinear form of production that creates a durable world for the free praxis and lexis of mortals. The most significant omission is the dignity and worth of the individual person who first appears in the world at birth and finally disappears at death. Arendt’s political humanism recognizes the worldly potential and inherent vulnerability of particular persons whose intrinsic importance does not depend on their ephemeral role in a grand historical drama or narrative.[108]
By emphasizing anthropological invariants like personal natality, individual need, common worldliness, human plurality and interdependence, Arendt presents a picture of freedom that avoids the illusion of autonomy. Human freedom requires political security, guaranteed civil liberties and diverse public forums for engaging with one’s peers in responsible self-government. Freedom does not depend on collective mastery and sovereignty but on the unpredictable interactions of finite mortals whose individual purposes frequently conflict; it is the uncertain fruit of mutual respect and voluntary cooperation, rather than the inevitable outcome of dialectical necessity and law. The Promethean desire for unlimited power must be clearly demystified. Sovereign power threatens human liberty rather than supporting it.[109] When humans attempt to become gods, they resort to ideology and terror and violate the rights of their peers. While Arendt generally remains silent about the truth claims of Judaism and Christianity, she deeply opposes the Promethean project of replacing the Biblical god with a fictional substitute. The defense of human dignity precludes the biological reduction of the human person and the inflated divinization of the human species.
“The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”[110]
Marx’s political philosophy, like his philosophical anthropology, is an uneasy blend of enlightenment and romantic prejudices. Like Hobbes, Marx conceives of politics in the categories of modern natural science. The political theories of both men are driven by powerful reductive assumptions: they tend to reduce the sphere of politics to the realm of government and to restrict the actions of government to the legalized use of force or violence. For Hobbes, individual citizens freely surrender their natural rights to the state in exchange for protective security. The socially conscious Marx rejects Hobbes’ fictional account of individual consent to the authority of centralized power. For Marx, the origin and purpose of government actually derive from oppressive economic relations. Throughout history, government has been the coercive instrument of the privileged economic class. While governments frequently claim to act for “the common good,” their primary function is to protect and defend existing property relations. Because political action and speech are invariably bound to economic interests, public action is authorized violence, and public speech the rhetorical concealment of government’s exploitative purpose.[111]
Politics would be a demoralizing enterprise, if this were the whole story. But Marx is a social expressivist as well as a naturalist captivated by economic prejudices. While government officials use legalized violence to defend economic oppression, revolutionary praxis is a genuine source of liberation. Emancipatory violence is “the midwife of history,” of every old society economically pregnant with its dialectically determined successor. In history’s decisive transitions, the laboring class rises to overthrow their economic and political oppressors. These revolutionary eruptions drive history forward without abolishing alienation and misery. In fact, proletarian misery under capitalism visibly undermines the liberal illusion of continuous historical progress.
While earlier social revolutions served the interests of the emerging class, the proletarian revolution will supposedly be decisive and final. The proletariat will act as a universal emancipator, destroying the historical sources of alienation and oppression. The abolition of capitalism will mean the permanent end of economic alienation and class struggle. Without class conflict, there will be no need for the legalized violence of the state. Politics, as we’ve known it since the slave owning Greeks, will completely disappear.[112]
Marx’s utopian dream has prophetic overtones, but he justifies his vision by appeals to historical necessity. Romantic and anarchistic calls for liberating violence tend to be rooted in sentiment and feeling. But Marx despises uncritical sentiment and revolutionary strategies divorced from scientific insight. Gratuitous violence against systemic oppression is futile until the economic contradictions within capitalism precipitate internal collapse. Strategic violence must wait till the classless society appears in the womb of its bourgeois antagonist.[113]
Marx’s assessment of violence and politics is deeply ambivalent. The history of government is a record of legalized violence by the ruling class against the economically oppressed. The use of compulsory force by the state is lacking in moral legitimacy. Since Marx reduces traditional politics to the coercive activity of government, he treats political activity as a source of human oppression. Revolutionary violence, by contrast, is historically liberating although its benefits until now have been limited. The liberated class has inevitably become an oppressive power in its own right. Yet these revolutionary episodes remain fundamental, preparing the way for the proletarian revolution and the classless society.
Marx’s “science” of history convinced him that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable and that proletarian violence would end human alienation. Given the certainties of Marxian theory and the prospect of the classless society, we can partly understand the tragic path that led Marx’s disciples from limited violence to unlimited terror.[114] Marxian ideology guaranteed revolutionary success if the messianic class acted decisively at the climactic moment. From Marx’s perspective, the human stakes in the war against capitalism are apocalytic: the end of world history and the permanent abolition of injustice and violence. To achieve such utopian ends, everything is permitted to the agents of global revolution: not only violence but terror, not only revolutionary struggle but the dictatorship of the communist party. Merciless treatment of the enemy is justified when the radical fulfillment of humanity is at hand. Absolute ends require unlimited means.
Marx’s acceptance of revolutionary violence coexists with explicit hostility to practical reason and speech. As Glen Tinder observed, Marxism combines a passion for universal community with an open disdain for communication, the distinctively human way of establishing lasting connections and alliances.[115] Why this systemic distrust of logos and argument in the conduct of human affairs? Why this aggressive disdain for persuasion, deliberative dialogue, political debate, the making and keeping of promises as the way to establish communities of justice and freedom? Marx’s contempt for the traditional political faculties (nous and logos) is strikingly over-determined; it is rooted in his reductive anthropology, his economic naturalism, his bitter experience of bourgeois ideology, and his cynical analysis of human motivation. If human beings are essentially productive animals, governed by material interests and needs and irrevocably moved by the prejudices of their economic class, then they are incapable of disinterested action and speech. To pretend otherwise is to mask or conceal the true dynamics of political life. Government is inherently oppressive because its real purpose is to protect economic inequities. Public law and authority are tools of class domination rather than instruments of impartial justice. Political argument and debate are vehicles of ideology and false consciousness rather than sources of practical wisdom. The dominant economic class and the government agencies serving its interests are incapable of meaningful reform, because moral norms and imperatives have no causal influence on political behavior. Promises of corrective action are simply ideological devices for pacifying the anger of the oppressed. Normative theories of politics and government conceal the violence of the state and divert revolutionary energies into useless reforms.[116]
Arendt also criticizes the history of government in the West. From her civic humanist perspective, most of what traditionally counts as politics has violated the republican ideal. The problem is not that governments have acted to protect economic interests, but that the equality and liberty of citizens are incompatible with traditional conceptions of rule, whether despotic or benevolent in nature. Not only have rulers narrowly pursued their self-interest, they have regularly prevented their citizens from participating meaningfully in public affairs.[117]
From the Marxist perspective, Arendt is a political idealist supporting a model of republican self-government with no chance of realization. Human beings are simply incapable of the sustained self-transcendence that republican politics requires. Moreover, to promote the republican ideal in a capitalist society is to conceal the dominance of the bourgeoisie and dissipate effective opposition to the status quo. From Arendt’s civic republican perspective, Marx has denigrated participatory citizenship and discredited the political capacities on which it depends, while endorsing dangerous assumptions about the nature and purpose of political power.
A comprehensive political philosophy requires a realistic understanding of power.[118] The English term ‘power,’ from its Latin root potentia and the French derivative pouvoir, (to be able to, to be capable of) is not synonomous with ‘force’ or ‘violence.’ In contrast to the strength of individual human beings, power is the fruit of human cooperation, the capacity for worldly change that citizens create when they agree to act in concert. Such agreement is typically achieved through public speech and argument. It normally expresses itself in mutual promises or in provisional or enduring political alliances. Of course, the power potential achieved through cooperation can be exercised for good or ill. Despotic power is regularly used to dominate others, to treat them unjustly, to deny them their rights and liberties. But political power can also be exercised legitimately to promote public peace, security, prosperity, liberty, education, social justice, the deepening of civic and associative union. Because humans are fallible and weak, and because power can be easily abused, the most effective check on abuse is not Marxian violence but federated dispersal, creating independent centers of power to correct and balance each other.[119] The persisting political danger is not the generation of power (there is no genuine politics without power), but concentrated power, despotic power, without effective public constraints on its use.
Violence is also a form of action. It is typically an expression of weakness rather than power, the form of action the weak adopt to accomplish ends they cannot achieve through power. Violence is inherently instrumental, a calculated means to achieve nonviolent ends. Though violence can destroy or cripple power, it cannot create it. When organized power resorts to violence, it should do so as a last resort, an ultima ratio , when the persuasive potential of speech and argument has been exhausted. Because discourse and persuasion are essential to genuine politics, violence as such is antipolitical. Its presence in public affairs symbolizes the limits of what can be done through relying on discourse alone.[120]
The legitimate use of violence must always be proportionate. The normative ends that violence serves are protective in nature, securing the public and private realms from grave threats to their integrity and survival. The repeated use or threat of violence is the mark of despotic rule; but despotism represents the abolition of politics and the end of political civility. Violence tends to beget violence, whether its use is legitimate or not. A strategy of violence as a means of changing the world is therefore exceedingly dangerous. This danger is magnified when unlimited violence, what Arendt calls terror, is chosen as the way to achieve utopian ends. Both Stalin and Hitler officially licensed terror, unlimited revolutionary violence, as the authorized way to achieve their ideological aims.[121]
The traditional conflation of action with making is a further reason for confusing power with violence. Fabrication typically entails violence, transforming natural materials in accord with the artisan’s preconceived plan. If human beings strive to become “makers and molders of history,” then the logic of fabrication justifies violence as part of their historical mission. The same confusion threatens successful revolutionaries who must establish a just society after overthrowing a despotic order. How do they prevent their liberating violence from becoming the basis of the new regime? Arendt insists that liberation from despotism and the constitution of enduring liberty cannot conform to the same pattern of action.[122] The founding of a free and just society depends on mutual promises and covenants, on a shared agreement to live in accordance with law and the protections of liberty, rather than coercively constructing the new community on the fragmented remains of the old. At the root of this difference are contrasting conceptions of political freedom. If founding a new community is modeled on making, on shaping human beings to fit a utopian design, then freedom will be modeled on sovereignty, maintaining unfettered control over the reconstructive process. But if public freedom is rooted in human plurality, on different political opinions and spontaneous practical initiatives, on spirited debate of alternative courses of action, then political engineering yields to the fallible process of achieving limited and fragile agreements together. In civilized societies, violence exists at the margin of politics, never at its center. Though violence will never disappear from human affairs, responsible communities deliberately limit its role in political life.[123]
Marx’s rebellion against “the tradition” is clearest when his revisionary claims are compared with Plato’s myth of the cave. In Plato’s provocative story, philosophers are unable to discover wisdom and truth unless they withdraw from the polis where change is incessant and the power of opinion (doxa) prevails. Only under the sky of eternal ideas can lovers of wisdom find what they erotically seek.
Marx forcefully rejected Plato’s transcendent metaphysics, exclusively affirming the dignity of the secular realm and the history that unfolded within it. Following Hegel, Marx insisted that secular history was an appropriate object of theoretical study. Only by understanding the causal dynamics within “the cave,” could human beings remake the world into a suitable home for their species.
For Arendt, the attribution of dignity to history should have led to the suspension of Platonic biases, fostering an unprejudiced account of political events and experiences and a deeper appreciation of human plurality and freedom. It should also have reconciled thought and action, closing the tragic rift between them that followed on Socrates’ death.[124]
Arendt’s political thinking had two complementary dimensions: her linguistic phenomenology discloses the intelligible structure of recurrent political phenomena like action, power and speech; her critical genealogy recounts the history of politics as a continuous struggle between freedom and despotism, where the periods of public freedom are few but glorious, and the forms of despotism many and varied. To complement these reflections on politics, Arendt acknowledged two other types of political thinking: practical deliberation, in which citizens debate the best course of future action, and reflective judgment, in which they compare their appraisals about what has already been done, said and suffered in the public realm.
The French and American Revolutions offered a rare opportunity to renew political thought. But Arendt contended that these adventures in liberty foundered, due to a failure of memory in America and European absorption in the philosophy and science of history. European thinkers largely ignored the American Revolution, concentrating their attention on the cataclysmic upheavals in France. Throughout the nineteenth century, conservatives, liberals and Marxists offered opposing accounts of this landmark historical event. Each of them tried to fit the French revolution into a polemical narrative of historical progress or decline. The unhappy result was one-sided reflection on the ultimate purpose of history, and the failure to develop a public philosophy attuned to the realities of the democratic age.[125]
In opposition to Plato, Hegel believed human history was inherently intelligible, that it constituted the dialectical fulfillment of an absolute rational idea.[126] World history, universal history, was a lawful rational process with a determinate beginning and end. This process was intelligible because it concretely expressed the dynamic realization of the divine idea, the idea of absolute spirit. For Hegel, both Platonic and Kantian “ideas of reason” were abstract, incomplete, and therefore lacking in truth. Only when rational ideas had been actualized in history, could they be fully understood and affirmed.[127]
Despite his striking originality, Hegel remained an essentially contemplative thinker. He focussed philosophical inquiry on the dynamic historical process that culminates in the actualization of freedom. By freedom, the immanent telos of history, Hegel meant the absolute autonomy of the Divine Spirit. Unlike the Christian God, Hegel’s temporal divinity became fully autonomous only by achieving self-knowledge. The fulfillment of the Divine Spirit, therefore, required the rational cooperation of finite human spirits. Divine self-knowledge depended on the philosophical insights of Hegel who conceptually grasped the meaning of history by understanding its ultimate purpose.
For Hegel, history was meaningful because it was purposive, and because the purpose it achieved fulfilled the divine will. But only in retrospect, when the owl of Minerva had taken flight, could this immanent meaning be grasped and articulated. Until then, humans misunderstood history, believing it had no purpose or mistakenly identifying its telos with the limited aims of particular men and societies. While these provisional aims play a role in the actualization of spirit, they fail to constitute the meaning of history.
Absolute spirit fulfills its intention through conflict and struggle; it deliberately creates external obstacles before overcoming them through its expressive development. The stages of developing spirit incorporate into its cumulative life whatever is essential and enduring in this dialectical process of growth. Individual human beings, particular cultural communities, the evolving history of western philosophy, all play instrumental but indispensable roles in the divine saga. It is human thoughts, human passions, human purposes that drive history forward; yet nearly all human agents fail to comprehend what they are doing. They are like theatrical performers without a script, unaware of the dialectical laws governing their interaction and struggle.
How is the autonomous freedom of absolute spirit intelligibly related to the subjective freedom of finite spirits? In a limited sense, human subjects are free because they act on their immediate desires and strive to achieve their particular aims. But their rational freedom is deficient, since they don’t know what they are doing. The significance of their actions is not the meaning they ascribe to them, but their role in fulfilling the divine plan. Only fully autonomous, fully rational spirit is genuinely free.
Arendt argued that Hegel remained bound by traditional philosophical prejudices.[128] The dialectical process culminating in freedom had to be necessary because reason was averse to contingency in its objects of study. Moreover, the particular agents, events and societies constituting history had no intrinsic dignity or importance. They derived their limited instrumental value from their subordinate roles in the drama of absolute spirit. Thus Hegel tragically endorsed two dangerous revolutionary assumptions: that the emergence of freedom is the result of dialectical necessity; that the value of historical particulars depends on their functional role in a pre-scripted teleological drama.[129]
Marx agreed with Hegel that history is a lawful dialectical process necessarily culminating in freedom. He also believed in a privileged historical agent, the evolving human species, that progressively develops through time. But for the anti-religious Marx, this historical agent was human rather than divine, and for the anti-contemplative Marx the great human contributions to history were practical and not theoretical. Pace Hegel, philosophy’s true purpose is to change the world not merely to understand its progressive development. In The Republic, Plato created an imaginary city that subordinated the vita activa to the demands of philosophical inquiry. In overturning the tradition, Marx created a philosophical blueprint for abolishing capitalism and achieving collective autonomy.
Marx radically naturalizes the substantive content of Hegel’s philosophy of history. The underlying historical dynamic is the economic conflict between the forces and relations of production; the critical players in the drama are the socio-economic classes locked in continuous struggle; the critical moments in the dialectic are the periodic social revolutions in which the exploited class overthrows its economic and political oppressor. History’s teleological climax will be the fulfillment of the French Revolution through the destruction of capitalism and the emergence of a classless and stateless society. Only then will true human freedom exist; only then will human alienation be fully overcome.[130]
The poverty of philosophy, its failure to abolish human alienation, is clearly revealed in Hegelian thought. The evidence of alienated thinking is pervasive: the conception of philosophy as contemplative reconciliation with the past; the narrative reliance on a fictional divine agent; the spiritualizing of the dialectical process; the failure to acknowledge the determinative power of economic causality. For Marx, Hegel reveals both the power and the limits of speculative thought. Hegel’s lasting discovery was that history is lawful and purposive. But Hegel’s dialectical narrative relies on spiritual fictions that Marx scornfully rejects. The culmination of history will permanently eliminate the false consolations of religion and philosophy.
To understand Marx’s philosophy of history, we must first understand his conception of science. He inherited from the Enlightenment and ultimately from Aristotle, what Bernard Lonergan calls the “classical theory of science”: the belief that science consists in true, certain knowledge of causal necessity.[131] In modern physics, the sources of causal necessity were not eternal Aristotelian essences, but universal and invariant laws. These laws were interpreted as mathematical descriptions of the irresistible processes governing the natural universe. All natural objects, all spatio-temporal occurrences, were supposedly subject to their implacable necessity. Marx believed that the historical process was also governed by universal laws, though the laws of history are dialectical unlike the classical laws of physics. While natural laws tend to be cyclical, history follows a rectilinear pattern based on the genesis and perishing of economic classes.
Marx departed from Enlightenment naturalism on another critical point. Modern physics explicitly rejected natural teleology, arguing that the lawful motions of nature lacked meaning and purpose. But both Marx and Hegel wanted to preserve the meaning of history; and both assumed that for history to be meaningful it had to be purposive, that it had to advance towards an ultimate and attainable telos.[132] They attempted to combine the lawful necessity they attributed to science with a traditional notion of practical teleology.[133] To achieve this improbable synthesis, they resorted to an historicized version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. In Hegel’s case he appealed to the cunning of absolute reason; in Marx, the desired teleology is guaranteed by the cunning of history. Hegel’s absolute spirit, like the providential God of the prophets, employs human passions and purposes to satisfy a divine intention of which human beings are largely unaware. Marx’s analogous claim is that the great social classes in history, by pursuing their narrow material interests, create the necessary conditions for radical human autonomy.
What sort of freedom does economic determinism leave to human agents in history, to the class-bound laborers, capitalists, statesmen, philosophers and artists? As in Hegel’s dialectic, they enjoy a form of alienated freedom. They act on their narrow intentions and purposes, they consistently pursue the self-interest of their class, they promote the productive capacity of the human species. But alienated freedom is not autonomous agency. Just as alienated labor radically differs from socialized labor, so alienated political violence differs from impartial public administration in a classless society. The same divergence obtains between alienated and autonomous thought. Alienated thought is the opposite of genuine science. Ideologies, as Marx uses the term, serve to justify oppressive economic conditions and the state’s reliance on violence to protect them. Genuine science, autonomous thought, discovers history’s dialectical laws and proves its validity by successfully directing revolutionary praxis. While liberal ideology justifies the violence of the bourgeois state, Marx’s science of history provides strategic directives for the proletariat in constructing a classless, and therefore, autonomous society.[134]
Are all serious thinkers who criticize Marx’s philosophy of history ideologues? Are their critical objections inevitably constrained by the biases of their social class? Or are they able to transcend group bias, achieving rational insight into society and history?[135] If Marx can avoid economic determinism in discovering historical truth, why are he and his disciples the only exceptions to the sway of ideology? For if the recognized power of group bias does not preclude disinterested thought, then how can we distinguish ideology from science except on empirical grounds? The issue is not whether economic causes play an important historical role, but whether they play the determinative role Marx assigns to them. To put it bluntly, how does Marx know that class struggle functions in history as gravity functions in nature? What historical fruits and works could confirm this explanatory theory?
Following Michael Polanyi, I want to propose a reading of Marx that differs from his own self construal.[136] Despite his radical critique of capitalism, Marx was an historical optimist convinced that the scandalous contradictions of modernity would finally be overcome. When this decisive transformation occurred, the utopian hopes of the French Revolution would be fulfilled. He was equally convinced that the key to the riddle of history was the continuous conflict between the forces and relations of production. Because this conflict had reached its zentith under capitalism, the climactic moment in the liberation of the species was at hand.
Marx asserted these beliefs not as romantic hopes or speculative theories, but as scientific certainties. He claimed to have discovered an historical science that truthfully explained the human past and infallibly predicted the future. This “science of historical necessity” also satisfied the Baconian demand for uniting theory and practice. Marx’s science of history provides practical guidance for the revolutionary praxis that will conclusively achieve his utopian ends.
Marx’s polemical strategy is to defend his utopian hopes by grounding them in infallible science. Revolutionary hopes are not mere romantic longings, because lawful and impersonal processes are working inexorably to fulfill them. Marx’s theories are true because they explain the contradictions of modernity and provide the only effective strategy for resolving them. Revolutionary violence, though admittedly heartless and cruel, is historically justified because it is the dialectical path to universal freedom and equality. The followers of Marx can be supremely confident because they are cooperating with historical necessity for the benefit of the entire human species.
The most reasonable way to challenge Marx is to question the evidence for his truth claims. But the dogmatic certainty Marx attributes to science tends to make him intolerant in the face of criticism. He does not advance his account as the most reasonable explanation to be amended in the light of recalcitrant evidence. Instead, he advances his theories and predictions as incontrovertible truths. They uniquely explain the conflicts of the past and justify a revolutionary strategy certain to produce the utopian outcomes that will permanently silence his critics.[137] Until then, all rival accounts are dismissed as ideologies; they cannot explain the contradictions of modernity nor provide an infallible strategy for overcoming them.
It was the scientist in Marx, and the ambition to raise his ‘science’ to the rank of natural science, whose chief category then was still necessity, that tempted him into the reversal of his own categories.[138]
Hannah Arendt explicitly rejects the scientific status of Marxian theory. She views Marx’s “science” of historical necessity as a fictional science, an ideology. As she uses the term, an ideology is a reductive explanation of historical complexity that seeks to unify the past through a single explanatory category like race or class.[139] She treats the national Socialist appeal to race and the Marxian appeal to class struggle as perfect examples of ideological thinking. Both ideologies create the illusion that there is a single interpretive key to history and that they possess it exclusively. This Gnostic pretension is then used to justify unlimited violence against whomever history has marked for extinction. The terrible confidence that flows from complying with historical necessity exempts ideological agents from powerful moral prohibitions against murder. The tragic results of ideological politics dominate the modern history of Europe. Hegel’s fateful dialectic of historical necessity corrupted the French and Russian Revolutions and poisoned the spirit of the greater revolutionary tradition. But the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were the nadir of political history as ideology and terror became the governing principles of criminal states.[140]
Arendt criticizes Marx for degrading the human capacities he originally intended to celebrate. He spurned Hegel’s theory of history for a Baconian project of revolutionary praxis allegedly based on infallible truth. In this way, he carried the logic of dialectical theorizing into the realm of free action and speech. This had the terrible effect of making political activity depend on the strategic guidance of “scientific theory.”[141] But in Marxism, the directive theory is a powerful ideology that superimposes “the laws of history” on politics and culture. These deterministic laws, when strictly interpreted, reduce human action and thought to mere functions of economic causality. While Marx exempts his own theory and praxis from these unwelcome reductions, he provides no credible warrant for distinguishing Marxian science from Arendtian ideology.
Arendt strongly opposes the Hegelian and Marxist strategies for preserving the dignity of history. While they emphasized world historical process, she believed that history consists of particular events and actions performed by individual persons in the company of their peers. These memorable actions are free and contingent occurrences inherently unpredictable in advance. In fact, genuine action, as opposed to habitual behavior, cannot be subsumed under an explanatory covering law.[142] Though all human actions are motivated by specific intentions, their historical meaning does not depend on achieving the ends they intended. And since free actions elicit the free response of their peers, there is no way to predict or control the full range of their historical effects.
It is a serious error to confuse the meaning of a human action, known only in retrospect by disinterested observers, with the intended purpose of the action or the results to which it may lead.[143] Only if you dogmatically assume a single historical agent whose governing purposes cannot be resisted by mortals, are you tempted to reduce the significance of particular human beings to their functional roles in an inevitable process. But for Arendt, this is precisely what Hegel and Marx uncritically assume. For Hegel, human agents and actions derive their instrumental value by unconsciously contributing to the governing purpose of absolute spirit. For Marx, they derive their functional value from creating the necessary conditions of the classless society. Both thinkers deprive the historical past and present of intrinsic worth; individual persons became disposable tools in the achievement of a pre-ordained future. Since all derivative meaning depends on achieving the absolute end, once the speculative teleology collapses, intrinsic meaning and value disappear from the world.[144]
If Marx’s secular hopes are extravagant and his guarantee of success ideological, where does that leave the understanding of history and our collective responsibility for the world?
My purpose in this final section is not to restate Arendt’s criticisms of Marx. Though I have benefitted greatly from her commentary, my appraisal of Marx follows a somewhat different tack. We are indebted to Marx and the radical enlightenment that inspired him for their critical diagnosis of economic and political injustice. Although Marx saw himself as a scientific critic of capitalism, it is his prophetic passion for justice that makes his critique so compelling. For Marx, capitalism was a necessary but not a permanent phase of the world historical process. Driven by internal contradictions, capitalism would eventually collapse from within, giving way to a socialist economy and a utopian classless society. Though Marx’s apocalyptic predictions failed to materialize, his moral critique of capitalism retains its force. The ruthless struggle to maximize profits, the pursuit of unlimited wealth, the reduction of everything human to commodity status, the brutal character of the factory system, the squalor of working-class neighborhoods, the scandalous concentration of wealth and political power, the degradation of the natural world, the periodic instability of the business cycle, the historical ties to imperialism, are all unjust and dehumanizing. We needn’t share Marx’s utopian dreams to support his objections to capitalism.
Marx’s moral critique of bourgeois society was also legitimate. The nineteenth century bourgeoisie were too often smug and pretentious. Faced with evident economic injustice, they eschewed solidarity with the working class and deliberately used the powers of government to protect their possessions and privileges. They also fostered a shallow optimism about the future of Europe, cloaking the injustices of industrial life under the mask of liberal ideology.
Bourgeois capitalists used the ideology of laissez faire to defend the economic and political order they had created. Justified calls for reform were rebuffed by invoking “the iron laws of economics” and the benevolence of “the invisible hand.” The shibboleths of classical liberalism kept European governments from acting on behalf of the working class and the vast majority of capitalists from reforming their economic conduct. Marx correctly emphasized the role of liberal ideology in excusing systemic injustice.
Marx was also properly scandalized by the deepening “social question.” The coexistence of deprivation and material abundance was and remains intolerable. The grinding poverty of the working class is not essential to economic progress. New forms of production have created a surplus of exchangeable goods and services that require new patterns of distribution and compensation. They also require an important role for national governments and international authorities to referee the conflicts between capital and labor, to guarantee the basic needs of the people, and to promote the prosperity of the larger society. Concerted bourgeois opposition to political and economic reform led Marx to believe that only revolutionary violence could solve “the social question.” Though I agree with Arendt that Marx’s justification of violence is a counsel of despair, I reject her assumption that political decisions and actions are economically irrelevant. The creation of a social safety net, the development of a mixed economy, the enactment of reasonable fiscal and monetary policies, the exemption of important public goods from market-based patterns of allocation, these political decisions and policies will not solve the problem of poverty, but they can and do alleviate it.
Scientific inquiry has dramatically increased the fund of human knowledge. Human productive capacity has grown exponentially with modern economic and technical developments. The political institutions created by democracy enable millions of citizens to act cooperatively on behalf of national and global purposes and projects. Our peers increasingly accept collective responsibility for our common world. They share the conviction of Marx and Arendt that the secular realm has a meaning and dignity of its own, that it merits our knowledge, attention and love.
This shared commitment to protecting and preserving the world and to working for justice within it should not be confused with Marx’s revolutionary project. Shared responsibility for the world does not require an ideology of historical progress, a definitive solution to the riddle of history or an end to human alienation. Responsible citizenship does not depend on a socialized humanity magically freed from the egoistic, group and general biases that make human existence a morally tangled knot. Authentic hopes for the world are far more sober than Marx’s utopian dreams. Human beings acting together responsibly can make our world better in numerous ways: more secure, more peaceful, more free, more just. What they can never do is make the world perfect and sinless. Practical wisdom and historical sobriety confirm the power and the limits of individual and collective activity.
What lasting insights can we draw from Marx’s philosophical anthropology? The human being is a causal agent situated in nature, society and history. As natural beings we share biological needs with the animals, though our evolving desires and the ways that we meet them are regularly transformed by the social and historical communities in which we live. Marx treated our social embeddedness as reducible to membership in an economic class. While economic realities are certainly important, they typically lack the causal influence Marx attributed to them. His emphasis on class membership also obscures the range of associations that command our allegiance and effort, religious, political, moral, artistic, etc. Marx claimed that these cultural and political allegiances are essentially determined by economic interests, and in some forms of society that may be true. But as a universal account of human affiliation and commitment, it is deeply implausible and reductive.
We are historical beings, and the various communities to which we belong are saturated with historical effects, both helpful and harmful. Our individual and collective actions occur within complex communities that frame the horizon for our various undertakings and projects. We can never leap out of history, either into a past for which we’re nostalgic like the classical polis, or into a revolutionary future that is clearly utopian and unreal.[145]
The exercise of freedom, both personal and public, is always partial and finite. We will never become autonomous in either the Kantian or the Marxian sense. But we are responsible for what we do with our lives within a world we did not create and in the company of others, most of whom are strangers. I agree with Arendt that we should explicitly reject the Marxian conflation of freedom with sovereignty. Human progress in the healing and creative arts is always partial and incomplete; and the Marxian ideal of sovereignty is incompatible with human plurality.
The Promethean project Marx passionately espoused needs to be deflated by humility and realism. Because of our natality, we will always be dependent and developing beings, always newcomers in an old world that we share with peers of different ages and backgrounds. We are endowed with an unrestricted desire to know and a need to make sense of all that we experience. The quest for knowledge and the search for meaning will never desert us, but our discoveries are fallible and subject to revision in the light of experience and criticism. Because we share the earth and the world with others, we cannot escape the question of justice, nor the exigent norms of responsible action that the concern for justice imposes. Because we are mortal, our reach exceeds our grasp, and we inevitably die with important hopes unfulfilled. There is enduring wisdom in the ancient trope that we humans exist between the brutes and the gods. Far more than instinctual animals, we are considerably less than the divine. This intermediate ontological status is a discernible constant in our historically variable condition.
There is no science of historical necessity. There is no permanent human solution to the contradictions of earthly life. Our tempered and responsible hopes for the future will have to rest on humbler and far less inflated grounds.
1. Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), p. 32.
2. Ibid., p. 17.
3. Ibid., pp.17-40.
4. These hierarchical contrasts are articulated in Republic VI and VII where Socrates distinguishes “true philosophers” from both their sophistic rivals and ordinary non-philosophical citizens.
5. For Arendt, Plato’s political philosophy originated in a specific historical event, the trial of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. She reads the philosopher-king as Plato’s revisionary attempt to resolve that conflict in favor of philosophy. Human Condition, p. 12, pp. 221-230; Thinking, p. 81.
6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, 5, 1095b,-13-1096a 10.
7. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions of their condition is the demand to give up a condition that requires illusion.” p. 69.
8. “If Being and Appearance part company forever, and this—as Marx once remarked—is indeed the basic assumption of all modern science, then there is nothing left to be taken on faith.” Arendt, Human Condition, p. 270. Arendt later traces this remark to Das Kapital, vol. III.
9. “Communism . . . is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. . . . It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.” Marx, Selected Writings, p. 89.
10. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 25.
11. Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 21 and the endnotes on p. 284 where she provides the textual sources in Marx for these concise formulations.
12. See the opening lines of Herodotus’ History, translated by David Greene (Chicago: U of CP, 1987). Arendt cites this Herodotean passage in Between Past and Future, p. 41.
13. See Arendt, On Revolution, p. 12, and Between Past and Future, p. 23. “The Greeks, living together in a polis, conducted their affairs by means of speech, through persuasion (peitho), and not by means of violence.”
14. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 158.
15. Hegel, Reason in History (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1953.) p. 47. “The insight to which philosophy should lead us is that the actual world is as it ought to be. God governs the world. The actual working of His government, the carrying out of His plan is the history of the world. Philosophy strives to comprehend and articulate this plan.”
16. Francis Bacon, Novum Organon, (Oxford, 1889) p. 265. See the chapter on “Fruits and Works” in Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967) pp.89-108.
17. Republic, 540a. “We shall require them (the philosopher-rulers) to turn upward the vision of their souls and fix their gaze on that which sheds light on all, and when they have thus beheld the good itself, they shall use it as a pattern for the right ordering of the state and the citizens and themselves.”
18. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 388-391, Preface to a Critique of Political Economy.
19. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 389-390 For the evolution of Marx’s concept of ideology, see Paul Ricoeur, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chapters 2-6 and Lobkowicz, Theory, pp. 261-270.
20. Arendt,Between Past and Future, pp. 21-25.
21. Ibid., p. 19.
22. Ibid., pp. 21-25.
23. How does Marx’s “socialized humanism,” grounded in the primacy of socially productive labor, differ from Arendt’s “political humanism” rooted in the human capacity for speech and action? How does “socialized man,” the animal laborans, differ from Arendt’s republican citizen, the zoon politikon. These are two of the central questions addressed in this chapter.
24. For Marx as a “romantic expressivist,” see Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 140-158.
25. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 89 “Communism as completed naturalism is humanism and as completed humanism is naturalism.”
26. Marx’s numerous references to the French Revolution emphasize the contrast between its universal aspirations and its limited results. The Revolution effectively destroyed the Ancien Regime, emancipating the bourgeoisie from the feudal order rather than emancipating humanity as such.
27. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 61-67.
28. See Albert Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.105-141.
29. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1955) and Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, (Montreal: McGill. Queens University, 1974).
30. See Hirschman and “The Doux-Commerce Thesis,” pp. 106-109, and Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), Part Two “How Economic Expansion Was Expected to Improve the Political Order,” pp. 67-113.
31. Marx, Selected Writings, “The Communist Manifesto,” pp 221-245.
32. See Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 59-66, for Arendt’s analysis of the “social question” and its critical role in Marx’s thought.
33. For the complex nature of Marx’s critique of capitalism, see Jeffrey Reiman, “Moral Philosophy: The Critique of Capitalism and the Problem of Ideology,” The Cambridge Companion to Marx, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 143-167.
34. See Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope, (Notre Dame Press, 1981). Lash carefully explores whether Marx’s thought can be read as a secularized doctrine of providence.
35. Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, (New York: Penguin, 1985) p. 177.
36. Arendt, Between Past and Future. “To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the time process itself is characteristic of all modern historical consciousness.” p. 68. Arendt is at pains to distinguish Hegel’s secular time consciousness from the Christian understanding of history in Augustine’s City of God.
37. Hegel, Reason in History, p. 27. “A principle, a law is something implicit, which as such, however true in itself, is not completely real (actual).”
38. See Hegel, Spirit, chapter 6 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001) and chapter 3. “Self Positing Spirit” in Taylor, Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp.76-124.
39. See Taylor, Hegel, chapter 19, “Philosophy.” “The vocation of philosophy from the very beginning is to be the vocation of spirit’s self-recognition in everything that is.” p. 512.
40. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 63-64; p. 106. “If I know religion as externalized human self-consciousness . . . thus I know that the self-consciousness that is part of my own self is not confirmed in religion, but in the abolition and super-session of religion.” See Lash, Hope, chapter 13, “The Criticism of Religion.”
41. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 69.
42. For Marx’s account of the history of metaphysical materialism, see Selected Writings, pp.149-155.
43. See Richard McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) pp. 303-343, for the core principles of ancient Greek Atomism.
44. Marx, Selected Writings, pp.160-161 “The Premises of the Material Method.”
45. Marx, Selected Writings, “Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” p.160.
46. Ibid.,pp. 389-390.
47. See Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice; Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope; Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society; Raymond Aren, Main Currents in Sociological Thought; The Cambridge Companion to Marx.
48. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 52.
49. Arendt was especially critical of Marx’s “preference for collective subjects like the ‘proletariat’; or ‘mankind,’ which act in accordance with supposed class or species interests.” Dana Villa, “The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,” p.7, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Within such collective subjects, the human plurality Arendt repeatedly emphasized is effaced.
50. Marx, Selected Writings, “The German Ideology” and “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy.”
51. See Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, pp.140-158.
52. This synoptic account follows Marx’s schematic outline in “Preface to the Critique of Political Economy.” It supplements that outline with insights from a wide range of Marx’s writings.
53. Selected Writings, p. 389.
54. For the argument that Marx’s economic narratives force a qualification of his alleged determinism, see Richard Miller, “Social and Political Theory: Class, State Revolution,” pp. 101-105 in The Cambridge Companion to Marx.
55. Arendt had grave reservations about this project long before its destructive environmental effects were known. See “Life As The Highest Good” and “The Victory of the Animal Laborans” in The Human Condition.
56. See “The Communist Manifesto,” Selected Writings, pp. 221-247.
57. The modern project of achieving mastery by obeying impersonal law is clearly articulated in Descartes’ and Bacon’s interpretations of modern science.
58. “We can call it the cunning of reason that the idea makes passions work for it, in such a way that the means by which it posits itself in existence lose thereby and suffer injury.” Hegel, Reason and History, pp. 31-43. Arendt argues that this influential Hegelian metaphor shaped the European revolutionary tradition with “the obvious and yet paradoxical result that instead of freedom necessity became the chief category of political and revolutionary thought.” On Revolution, pp. 52-53.
59. For Marx’s argument that earlier revolutionary agents did not really know what they were doing, see “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Selected Writings, pp. 300-324.
60. Ibid., pp. 71-73.
61. For Marx, these appear to be constitutive features of full human emancipation.
62. See Michael Polanyi’s description of Marxism as “a prophetic idealism spurning all reference to ideals.” Personal Knowledge, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) pp. 227-233.
63. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 140.
64. I have drawn on Marx’s “Economic Writings 1857-1867” in the McLellan volume for this synoptic portrait of capitalism. I have also benefited from Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, particularly chapters 1-6.
65. For Arendt’s portrait of the classical household, see Human Condition II, “The Public and the Private Realm.”
66. Ibid., pp. 61-66.
67. See Heilbroner, “The Economic Revolution,” pp. 18-41.
68. See Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, pp.101-113 and Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society, pp.106-109.
69. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, p. 8. “Commerce . . . polishes and softens barbaric ways as we can see everyday.” A similar note is struck in Constant’s famous essay, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.”
70. See Hirschman, “The Concept of Interest: From Euphemism to Tautology,” Rival Views, pp. 35-55.
71. For a plausible account of why the “Doux-Commerce Thesis” of commercial capitalism became “the self-destruction thesis” of industrial capitalism, see Hirschman, Rival Views, pp. 105-119.
72. See Charles Breunig, The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850, (New York: Norton, 1977), chapter 4. “The Industrial Revolution and Its Impact on European Society.”
73. For Marx, the central paradox of bourgeois capitalism was the coexistence of unprecedented wealth with working class deprivation.
74. Marx’s exposition and critique of political economy provides an important connection between the early and later phases of his thought. See “The Holy Family,” p.184.
75. See Hirschman, Rival Views, and Heilbroner, p. 147.
76. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 345-362.
77. Ibid., pp. 206, 348, 350, 385, 411.
78. Ibid., pp. 223, 232-235.
79. Ibid., “The Rise and Downfall of Capitalism,” pp. 362-365, 488-492.
80. Marx took the revolutionary ideal of universal emancipation for granted. He relentlessly criticizes any aspect of modern reality or thought that obstructs or compromises his revolutionary vision.
81. Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 222-231. “. . . for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,” it has substituted naked shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
82. Ibid., p. 226, “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.”
83. Ibid., pp. 362-365, 485-492.
84. See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, “The Magic of Marxism,” pp. 227-233.
85. Selected Writings, pp. 77-87, 117-122, 365-370.
86. Marx emphasizes the alienation of labor under capitalism in all phases of his intellectual career.
87. Selected Writings, pp. 195-197, 248-268, 393-414, 453-470. See Arendt, “The Exchange Market,” Human Condition, pp. 159-167, and Past and Future, pp. 32-35.
88. This account synthesizes multiple passages from Marx’s economic writings.
89. “Modern bourgeois society . . . is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld which he has called up by his spells.” Selected Writings, p. 226.
90. See “Private Property and Communism,” pp. 87-96, 179-187, 231-238.
91. For Arendt’s critique of socialism and communism in practice, see Crises, pp. 211-215. “In essence, socialism has simply continued and driven to its extreme, what capitalism began.”
92. The rhetorical expression of this thesis is the heart of The Communist Manifesto.
93. Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, p. 44.
94. See Arendt, The Human Condition, for “The Reversal of Contemplation and Action in the Modern Age.” “Contemplation itself became altogether meaningless,” p.292; and Crises, pp.114-115.
95. All the destructive antagonisms that have darkened human history, between man and nature, man and man, and man and himself, will be transformed into relations of harmony. For Freud’s stark critique of the utopian strain in Marx’s thought, see Civilization and Its Discontents, and the concluding essay “Weltanschauung” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.
96. Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 87-109.
97. For the Arendtian distinctions between labor-life, work-world, and action-web of plurality, see sections III, IV and V in The Human Condition.
98. See “The Traditional Substitution of Making for Acting,” The Human Condition, pp. 220-230, and Between Past and Future, pp. 77-86. For Arendt, the fateful substitution of making for acting connects Plato, the beginning of western political philosophy, with Marx, its putative end.
99. For the moral appeal of an explicit contempt for moral scruples, see Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 227-237. “The more inordinate our moral aspirations and the more completely amoral our objectivist outlook, the more powerful is a combination in which these contradictory principles mutually reinforce each other.”
100. See Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, “Totalitarian Elements in Marxism,”pp. 63-108.
101. For the loneliness of mass society, see Origins, pp. 474-479; for the wordlessness of the animal laborans, see Human Condition, pp. 118-119.
102. The predicted demise of capitalism resulted from its inability to sustain the productive momentum it had originally unleashed.
103. The Human Condition, p. 89.
104. “The modern age in general and Karl Marx in particular, overwhelmed, as it were, by the unprecedented actual productivity of western mankind, had an almost irresistible tendency to look upon all labor as work and to speak of the animal laborans in terms much more fitting for homo faber.” The Human Condition, p. 87.
105. See Bikhu Parekh, “Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Marx.” Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, pp. 67-100.
106. See Parekh, pp. 85-87 and Lobkowicz, p. 419.
107. See Taylor’s critique of the Marxist aspiration to species autonomy in Hegel and Modern Society, pp. 141-154.
108. See “The Concept of History” in Past and Future and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. “Man’s dignity demands that he be seen (every single one of us) in his particularity and, as such, be seen—but without any comparison and independent of time—as reflecting mankind in general.” p. 77.
109. For the critical contrast between freedom as virtuosity and freedom as sovereignty, see Past and Future, pp. 163-165. “Under human conditions . . . freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously.” p.164.
110. Crises, p. 177.
111. “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Selected Writings, p. 238.
112. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Selected Writings, p. 238.
113. “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.” Selected Writings, p. 390.
114. Marx clearly believed that only limited violence would be needed to overthrow capitalism once it had exhausted its economic viability. It is unfair to attribute directly to Marx the limitless terror unleashed in his name. Still, Arendt was leery of the “totalitarian elements in Marxism.” See Crises, p. 113.
115. Tinder, Against Fate. “Fate and Fraternity,” pp. 106-113.
116. For Arendt, Marx’s glorification of violence was critically paired with his suspicion of logos and persuasive speech. See Between Past and Future, pp. 22-25 and 76-84.
117. “The hallmark of all such escapes (from politics) is the concept of rule . . . the notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and others forced to obey.” Human Condition, p. 222.
118. For Arendt’s distinctions between violence, power, force and strength, see “On Violence,” Crises.
119. For Montesquieu’s conception of divided power and its role in shaping the American Constitution, see On Revolution, pp.149-154.
120. Crises, p.176. “Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it.”
121. See chapter 13, “Ideology and Terror” in Origins.
122. See the critical distinction between liberation and constitution in On Revolution, pp. 232-234.
123. See Past and Future, pp.136-141.
124. See “History and Politics,” pp.75-86, Past and Future.
125. See “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure.” On Revolution, pp.215-231.
126. When Hegel refers to an idea of reason, he is tacitly invoking the history of western metaphysics. Like the eide of Plato’s Republic or the noumenal ideas of Kant, Hegelian ideas are the intentional objects of philosophical inquiry. They are the unconditioned realities reason seeks in its quest for wisdom. But Hegel believes these ideas are inherently generative, that they produce their embodied expressions in space and time; and that the fullness of such expressions actualizes the idea, achieving its intended truth. True knowledge of the idea requires rationally understanding its fully embodied expression. Thus the rational idea of freedom or spirit actualizes itself in world history, providing philosophy with its proper field of inquiry.
127. “Thus philosophy does not tend to arise when an age is in its prime, in the bloom of youth, but rather when it has already started to grow old.” Taylor, Hegel. “Philosophy begins with the decline of the world.”
128. For Arendt, these were traditional prejudices about the objects of rational knowledge, in particular, the alleged causal necessity that reason demands in genuine science.
129. These assumptions, rooted in the classical theory of science, imposed a procrustean grid on the revolutionary tradition. Practical insights drawn from revolutionary events and experiences were sacrificed to traditional prejudices about historical intelligibility.
130. Marx’s classless society, therefore, is a secular analogue to the Christian ideal of the kingdom of God. In both kingdoms, universal harmony is achieved by overcoming the sources and effects of sin and alienation.
131. See Lonergan, Collection (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) pp. 238-240.
132. For Arendt’s criticism of the conflation between meaning and purpose (end), see Between Past and Future, pp. 78-81.
133. By practical teleology, I mean the telos at which a deliberative agent aims in intentional action.
134. Marx seems to distinguish two different kinds of ideology: religious ideology is a form of false consolation that creates fictional satisfactions for unmet human needs. By contrast, liberal economic theory may be an accurate reflection of bourgeois capitalism, but it fails to reveal the contradictions within the capitalist system. Both forms of ideology lack the critical dimension Marxian theory requires. They serve to justify rather than critique alienated forms of economic and political organization.
135. For the distorting role of bias in human inquiry, see Lonergan, Insight, pp. 218-242.
136. See Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pp. 218-245.
137. See Arendt’s analysis in Origins of how historical ideologies use terror to corroborate their factual claims, pp. 460-479.
138. On Revolution, p. 65.
139. Origins, pp.158-161, 345-351.
140. See “Ideology and Terror,” pp. 460-479 in Origins.
141. Between Past and Future, p. 30.
142. For the distinction between action and predictable behavior, see The Human Condition, pp. 40-46.
143. See The Human Condition, pp. 184-187; 191-192.
144. “The growing meaningless of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end.” Between Past and Future, p. 78.
145. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, p. 352. “Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free.”